Pascal Jan Hitz

Research area

I am a Ph.D. student in Prof. Alexandre Refregier's Cosmology Group at ETH Zurich, specializing in radio cosmology. My research focuses on simulating the distribution of cosmological neutral hydrogen (HI) in the post-reionization universe. These simulations are designed for forecasting and forward modeling purposes of dedicated 21 cm intensity mapping experiments. To achieve this, we employ the halo model framework, using the fast PINOCCHIO code to generate the past light cone of dark matter halos. These halos are subsequently populated with HI according to a HI-halo mass relation. To facilitate statistical comparisons with theoretical predictions, I have also implemented an analytical dark matter and HI halo model in PyCosmo – a Python package for theoretical cosmological predictions developed by our research group. A first description of our simulation method, along with a comparison of key statistical properties against the analytical predictions, can be found in arXiv:2410:01694.

As part of my work, I am a member of the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX), which is a radio interferometer array project under construction in South Africa, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) Cosmology Science Working Group, and the SKA Switzerland Consortium (SKACH), which is leading the country's contributions to SKAO.