From discussion at an Unconference session at LSST2018, we concluded that the Science Collaborations have a diverse range of ways to coordinate papers within their collaborations, but there is not yet a full list of all white papers. We’d like to make a table of planned white papers both to give an overview of what’s being proposed and to allow for cross-cutting collaborations and sharing of resources when relevant (such as metrics, simulations, etc.). We’ll try to do this through LSST Community. If you want to participate, please edit this post with the name of the lead author(s), the Science Collaboration(s) involved, if any, the title of your paper, the kind of cadence (WideFastDeep, MiniSurvey, Deep Drilling Field, Twilight, or TOO) that you are proposing to address, and any notes you wish to share about your paper effort. (Thanks to TVS for inspiring the template of this table).
PS. I’ve prepopulated the table with papers that have been listed on Community or that I know something about, corrections welcome.
| Lead Authors | Collaboration | Title | Kind | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| K. Olsen, P. Szkody | SMWLV, TVS | Mapping the Periphery and Variability of the Magellanic Clouds | MiniSurvey, DDF | A two-tiered proposal comprising a DDF survey of the Cloud main bodies and Mini Survey of the entire SCP region |
| J. Strader | SMWLV | Extending WFD to the Galactic Plane | WFD | |
| W.N. Brandt | AGN | AGN Science in the LSST DDFs | DDF | Goal is to state the needed total DDF exposures and needed DDF cadences for strong AGN studies. Drivers include SDSS-V/4MOST reverberation mapping, photometric reverberation mapping, and SMBH transient phenomena |
| G.T. Richards | AGN | LSST Rolling Cadence Optimized for AGN Science | WFD | Goal is to explore what rolling cadence choices would work well/acceptably for variable AGN science in WFD |
| G.T. Richards | AGN | Twilight Survey at Large Airmass | Twilight | Goal is to investigate the benefits to photo-z of a twilight survey in the g-band at large airmass, levering the effect of differential chromatic refraction. See https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3909 |
| Dan Scolnic, Michelle Lochner | DESC | Optimizing Cosmological Constraints from the DDFs and Mini-surveys | MiniSurvey, DDF, Twilight, TOO | Goal is to choose extra DDFs, cadence, ToO program, other mini-surveys |
| Michelle Lochner, Dan Scolnic | DESC | Optimizing Cosmological Constraints from WFD | WFD | Goal is to optimize WFD overall observing strategy including cadence, exposure times, filter changes |
| Meg Schwamb (@mschwamb) | SSSC | Observing the North Ecliptic Spur | MiniSurvey | Investigate benefits of the NES and optimum survey strategy in NES (would a subset of current observations be sufficient? do we want different filters or depths?). |
| David Trilling (@davidtrilling) | SSSC | DD fields for solar system objects | DD | DD options for solar system objects |
| Rob Seaman (@RobSeaman) | SSSC | Twilight survey for NEOs | Twilight | Investigate possibilities for discovering NEOs during a twilight survey |
| Raffaella Margutti @raffaellamargutti | TVS | ToO observations of GW events with LSST | ToO | Target of Opportunity We are still working to identify the best observing strategy, which will necessarily be a strong function of the properties of the GW event (i.e. size of the localization region, distance of the event etc). |
| W. Dawson & PALS collab. @wadawson | TVS, DESC | Microlensing Black Hole Survey of the Milky Way Bulge and Magellanic Clouds | MiniSurvey | A time variable survey of the Bulge in Clouds designed to detect the multi-year parallax microlensing signal of black holes in the Milky Way disk and halo. Can couple with shorter timescale surveys. |
| federica bianco @fed | TVS | Fast transients detection and characterization with LSST WFD | WFD | 3 visit, the first two in 2 filters, filter (A), revisit with another filter (B) within 30 minutes , and revisit the field with a larget time gap (~3h) with either filter A or B |
| Melissa L Graham @MelissaGraham | TVS | Cadence Optimization for Supernova Physics | WFD, MiniSurvey, DDF | A denser cadence than WFD in terms of filters and inter-night gap, but details TBD. |
| Suvi Gezari | TVS | The importance of u-band for identifying tidal disruption events in the LSST transient stream | WFD | We would like to explore the possibility of having a cadence in the u band that matches the g and r bands…at least for a subregion of the sky. |
| Rachel Street @rstreet | TVS | Unique Science from a Coordinated LSST-WFIRST Survey of the Galactic Bulge | DDF | We propose to monitor a single Deep Drilling Field centered on the WFIRST Bulge survey at high cadence (hourly or better) while the field is visible simultaneously from Earth and space, with extended monitoring at lower cadence to take place during the gaps between WFIRST’s Bulge survey periods. |
| Rachel Street @rstreet | TVS | The Diverse Science Return from Extending the Wide-Fast-Deep Survey to the Galactic Plane | WFD | Our proposal would extend the Wide-Fast-Deep survey strategy to include the Galactic Plane, but using a restricted range of filters (griz) rather than the full set to minimize the impact on the rest of the Main Survey. |
| Sara Bonito | TVS | Young stars with variability | WFD | It will be fixed later, but as observed in classical T Tari stars as TW Hya variability ranging from 30 min to several hours are expected due to the accretion process that we aim at investigating in u, r, and z filters. |
| Keaton J. Bell @keatonb | TVS | A cadence for reduced aliasing in LSST | WFD | We propose an additional consideration for the scheduler that weights fields according to when observations will contribute least to aliasing. The current aliases for each field can be calculated at the start of each night from the history of observations. We can then compute the times throughout the night when additional observations would worsen or alleviate these aliases. The scheduler should give preference to observation epochs that lessen the effect of aliasing, while still meeting other cadence requirements. |
| Michael Lund @lundmb | TVS | Observing the Galactic Plane as a MiniSurvey | MiniSurvey | ~1000 observations (same as WFD, roughly), but likely with a different filter distribution (likely mostly g, r, i) and revisit strategy (more likely to benefit from slightly more uniformly sampled observations instead of pairs of observations one hour apart) |
| John Gizis @jgizis | SMWLV | Twilight Survey for Milky Way | MiniSurvey | Details TBD, but big picture is a twilight survey aimed at extending LSST photometric system to brighter stars. Will probably concentrate on 3 filters. |
| Gisella Clementini - Ilaria Musella @ilaria.musella | TVS | The Gaia-LSST Synergy and Constraining Theory using LSST observations | MiniSurvey | Cadence should be optimised to allow the coverage of both short period (P< 1 d) variable stars such as RR Lyrae and delta Scuti and longer period variables (P from a few days up to about 100 d) such as Cepheids and LBVs. |
| Katja Bricman @bricmank | TVS | TDEs with LSST | WFD | test how the cadences released with the white paper call affect observations of TDEs. optimisation TBD |
| Mari Teresa Botticella @mtbotticella | TVS | SN rates and demography with LSST | DDF | We want to observe the deep drilling fields in one band with a cadence of 2-4 days to obtain detailed light curves for each transient and other two bands observations once a week to monitor the transient colour evolution. |
| Massimo Dall’Ora @dallora | TVS | RR Lyrae stars in the inner bulge: where the eagles dare | MiniSurvey | The pulsation periods of RR Lyrae stars range typically from 0.3 to 0.8 days, and therefore a continuous monitoring (let’s say, one or two data points per hour) during three or four consecutive nights would be the more effective technique to pick them and to provide robust pulsational parameters. This single run could be repeated over time, to improve the detection and derive more robust parameters and, even more importantly, to highlight the possible light curve modulations (the Blazhko effect). |
| Barbara Balmaverde @balmaverde | TVS | The Blazar scientific case for LSST | WFD, MiniSurvey, DDF, ToO | Showing peculiar and unpredictable behavior, 1) a reference filter to be used every night avoiding color conversion between different filters by acquiring one visit per night in the r-band and the other visit in one of the other filters according to the scheduled sequence, or by acquiring the two 15 sec exposures of a visit in different filters. 2) keeping the main Wide-Fast-Deep cadence as uniform as possible would likely facilitate the detection of periodic behaviours in the light curve analysis. MS: support the proposed mini survey in the North Ecliptic Spur, since this is a portion of the sky that it is covered by two radio surveys, the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) and most notably the VLA FIRST Survey at 20 cm. DDF: Among the four already approved DDFs, only COSMOS contains two known blazars, which are faint and relatively quiet objects that are not suited to study the jet structure and physics. We thus plan to propose additional DDFs that are centered on a bright and very variable candidate neutrino source, and which contain also further known blazars of different flavours. We might ask for a ToO every time a high-energy neutrino is detected by IceCube or by the next generation neutrino detectors. |
| Raffaella Margutti @raffaellamargutti | TVS | ToO observations of GW events with LSST | ToO | Target of Opportunity We are still working to identify the best observing strategy, which will necessarily be a strong function of the properties of the GW event (i.e. size of the localization region, distance of the event etc). |
| Knut Olsen, Humna Awan, Marcella Di Criscienzo, Eric Gawiser, Lynne Jones, Edward Lin, Phil Marshall | SS, TVS, DESC, SMWLV, Galaxies, SL | Peaceful Solutions to the Cadence Wars | WFD, MiniSurvey | A white paper that derives from a hack at the LSST Cadence Workshop at Flatiron Institute, aimed at redefining the areas of WFD and MiniSurveys |
| Oscar Gonzalez, @willclarkson, Victor Debattista, Christian Johnson, Mike Rich | SMWLV | Galactic Bulge static science: photometry and proper motions | WFD, MiniSurvey | This was originally planned as a contribution to Jay Strader’s whitepaper, but is being split off into a standalone whitepaper-proposal to add a clear voice for static science (proper motions and photometry). While still a little rough around the edges, comments are welcome at this stage. |
