Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

Future Large Scale Structure surveys are expected to improve over current bounds on primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG), with a significant impact on our understanding of early Universe physics. The level of such improvements will however strongly depend on the extent to which late time non-linearities erase the PNG signal on small scales. In this work, we show how much primordial information remains in the bispectrum of the non-linear dark matter density field by implementing a new, simulation-based, methodology for joint estimation of PNG amplitudes ($f_{\rm NL}$) and standard $\Lambda$CDM parameters. The estimator is based on optimally compressed statistics, which, for a given input density field, combine power spectrum and modal bispectrum measurements, and numerically evaluate their covariance and their response to changes in cosmological parameters. We train and validate the estimator using a large suite of N-body simulations (QUIJOTE-PNG), including different types of PNG (local, equilateral, orthogonal). We explicitly test the estimator's unbiasedness, optimality and stability with respect to changes in the total number of input realizations. While the dark matter power spectrum itself contains negligible PNG information, as expected, including it as an ancillary statistic increases the PNG information content extracted from the bispectrum by a factor of order $2$. As a result, we prove the capability of our approach to optimally extract PNG information on non-linear scales beyond the perturbative regime, up to $k_{\rm max} = 0.5~h\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, obtaining marginalized $1$-$\sigma$ bounds of $\Delta f_{\rm NL}^{\rm local} \sim 16$, $\Delta f_{\rm NL}^{\rm equil} \sim 77$ and $\Delta f_{\rm NL}^{\rm ortho} \sim 40$ on a cubic volume of $1~(\mathrm{Gpc}/h)^3$ at $z=1$. At the same time, we discuss the significant information on cosmological parameters contained on these scales.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figure

Abstract:

In the context of modified gravity, at the linear level, the growth of structure in the Universe will be affected by modifications to the Poisson equation and by the background expansion rate of the Universe. It has been shown that these two effects lead to a degeneracy which must be properly accounted for if one is to place reliable constraints on new forces on large scales or, equivalently, modifications to general relativity. In this paper we show that current constraints are such that assumptions about the background expansion have little impact on constraints on modifications to gravity. We do so by considering the background of a flat, Λ cold dark matter universe, a universe with a more general equation of state for the dark energy, and finally, a general, model-independent, expansion rate. We use Gaussian processes to model modifications to Poisson's equation and, in the case of a general expansion rate, to model the redshift-dependent Hubble rate. We identify a degeneracy between modifications to Poisson's equation and the background matter density, ωM, which can only be broken by assuming a model-dependent expansion rate. We show that, with current data, the constraints on modifications to the Poisson equation via measurements of the growth rate range between 10-20% depending on the strength of our assumptions on the Universe's expansion rate.