Inferring Cosmic String Tension through the Neural Network Prediction of String Locations in CMB Maps

Understand

In previous work, we constructed a convolutional neural network used to estimate the location of cosmic strings in simulated cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy maps.

• We derived a connection between the estimates of cosmic string locations by this neural network and the posterior probability distribution of the cosmic string tension $G\mu$.
• Here, we significantly improve the calculation of the posterior distribution of the string tension $G\mu$.
• We also improve our previous plain convolutional neural network by using residual networks.