1. Quijote-PNG: Quasi-maximum likelihood estimation of Primordial Non-Gaussianity in the non-linear halo density field
- Author
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Gabriel Jung, Dionysios Karagiannis, Michele Liguori, Marco Baldi, William R. Coulton, Drew Jamieson, Licia Verde, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, and Benjamin D. Wandelt
- Subjects
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) ,Space and Planetary Science ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Astronomy and Astrophysics ,Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics - Abstract
We study primordial non-Gaussian signatures in the redshift-space halo field on non-linear scales, using a quasi-maximum likelihood estimator based on optimally compressed power spectrum and modal bispectrum statistics. We train and validate the estimator on a suite of halo catalogues constructed from the Quijote-PNG N-body simulations, which we release to accompany this paper. We verify its unbiasedness and near optimality, for the three main types of primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG): local, equilateral, and orthogonal. We compare the modal bispectrum expansion with a $k$-binning approach, showing that the former allows for faster convergence of numerical derivatives in the computation of the score-function, thus leading to better final constraints. We find, in agreement with previous studies, that the local PNG signal in the halo-field is dominated by the scale-dependent bias signature on large scales and saturates at $k \sim 0.2~h\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, whereas the small-scale bispectrum is the main source of information for equilateral and orthogonal PNG. Combining power spectrum and bispectrum on non-linear scales plays an important role in breaking degeneracies between cosmological and PNG parameters; such degeneracies remain however strong for equilateral PNG. We forecast that PNG parameters can be constrained with $\Delta f_\mathrm{NL}^\mathrm{local} = 45$, $\Delta f_\mathrm{NL}^\mathrm{equil} = 570$, $\Delta f_\mathrm{NL}^\mathrm{ortho} = 110$, on a cubic volume of $1 \left({ {\rm Gpc}/{ {\rm h}}} \right)^3$, at $z = 1$, considering scales up to $k_\mathrm{max} = 0.5~h\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$., Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures. v2: minor updates to match published version
- Published
- 2022
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