Higher signal from lower densities - CANCELED

The standard way to extract cosmological information from the large-scale structure is to measure two point functions. This statistic is mostly sensitive to the high density regions, which are highly nonlinear objects. Thus, their clustering properties are highly correlated on small scales and the cosmological information in them is limited. On the hand, cosmic voids - the less dense patches of the Universe - are mildly nonlinear regions that are expected to maintain most of their initial cosmological information. Moreover, being devoid of dark matter, voids are sensitive to diffuse components such as neutrinos - the last particles of the Standard Model whose masses are still unknown. The properties of voids are not well contained within, or easily extracted from, standard two point functions. In this talk I will discuss marked two point statistics, which are two point functions where each point is weighted by a mark. The mark can be a function of the local density around each point and can be used to up-weight points in low density regions compared to points in high density regions; this helps to extract cosmological information from voids. In particular, I will present the results of a Fisher analysis performed on the Quijote simulations; this analysis quantifies the cosmological information that can be extracted from the matter density field using marked power spectra.

Speaker:  Elena Massara, Univ. of Waterloo

Editor's Note: This talk may also be presented on 3/10 at UC Berkeley