Matteo Zennaro

Abstract:

The past few years have seen the emergence of a wide array of novel techniques for analyzing high-precision data from upcoming galaxy surveys, which aim to extend the statistical analysis of galaxy clustering data beyond the linear regime and the canonical two-point (2pt) statistics. We test and benchmark some of these new techniques in a community data challenge named “Beyond-2pt,” initiated during the Aspen 2022 Summer Program “Large-Scale Structure Cosmology beyond 2-Point Statistics,” whose first round of results we present here. The challenge data set consists of high-precision mock galaxy catalogs for clustering in real space, in redshift space, and on a light cone. Participants in the challenge have developed end-to-end pipelines to analyze mock catalogs and extract unknown (“masked”) cosmological parameters of the underlying ΛCDM models with their methods. The methods represented are density-split clustering, nearest neighbor statistics, BACCO power spectrum emulator, void statistics, LEFTfield field-level inference using effective field theory (EFT), and joint power spectrum and bispectrum analyses using both EFT and simulation-based inference. In this work, we review the results of the challenge, focusing on problems solved, lessons learned, and future research needed to perfect the emerging beyond-2pt approaches. The unbiased parameter recovery demonstrated in this challenge by multiple statistics and the associated modeling and inference frameworks supports the credibility of cosmology constraints from these methods. The challenge data set is publicly available, and we welcome future submissions from methods that are not yet represented.

Abstract:

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>We present a cosmological analysis of the combination of the DES-Y3, KiDS-1000 and HSC-DR1 weak lensing samples under a joint harmonic-space pipeline making use of angular scales down to ℓ<jats:sub>max</jats:sub>=4500, corresponding to significantly smaller scales (δθ ~ 2.4') than those commonly used in cosmological weak lensing studies. We are able to do so by accurately modelling non-linearities and the impact of baryonic effects using<jats:monospace>Baccoemu</jats:monospace>. We find<jats:italic>S</jats:italic><jats:sub>8</jats:sub>≡<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic><jats:sub>8</jats:sub>√(Ω<jats:sub>m</jats:sub>/0.3) = 0.795<jats:sup>+0.015</jats:sup><jats:sub>-0.017</jats:sub>, in relatively good agreement with CMB constraints from<jats:italic>Planck</jats:italic>(less than ~1.8<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic>tension), although we obtain a low value of Ω<jats:sub>m</jats:sub>=0.212<jats:sup>+0.017</jats:sup><jats:sub>-0.032</jats:sub>, in tension with<jats:italic>Planck</jats:italic>at the ~3σ level. We show that this can be recast as an H<jats:sub>0</jats:sub>tension if one parametrises the amplitude of fluctuations and matter abundance in terms of variables without hidden dependence on H<jats:sub>0</jats:sub>. Furthermore, we find that this tension reduces significantly after including a prior on the distance-redshift relationship from BAO data, without worsening the fit. In terms of baryonic effects, we show that failing to model and marginalise over them on scales<jats:italic>ℓ</jats:italic>≲ 2000 does not significantly affect the posterior constraints for DES-Y3 and KiDS-1000, but has a mild effect on deeper samples, such as HSC-DR1. This is in agreement with our ability to only mildly constrain the parameters of the Baryon Correction Model with these data.</jats:p>