Ph.D. Candidate: Dylan Britt
Research Advisor: Tom Abel and Daniel Gruen

Zoom Link: https://stanford.zoom.us/j/97963773363

Zoom Password: Email physicsstudentservices@stanford.edu for password.

The one-point probability density function (PDF) of galaxies and matter is a powerful cosmological probe with information content that is complementary to standard two-point correlation functions. In past applications, the constraining power of this PDF has been limited by a lack of informed prior knowledge on the degree of shot noise in galaxy counts in cosmological surveys. In this talk, I will present computational methods for characterizing this shot noise using a combination of numerical simulations and analytical models of the galaxy-halo connection. I will also introduce my ongoing work applying these results to data from the Dark Energy Survey using a recently developed method for selecting informative prior distributions for Bayesian analyses.