An Optimal In-Situ Multipole Algorithm for the Isotropic Three-Point Correlation Functions
Abstract
We present an optimised multipole algorithm for computing the three-point correlation function (3PCF), tailored for application to large-scale cosmological datasets. The algorithm builds on a interpretation of correlation functions, wherein spatial displacements are implemented via translation window functions. In Fourier space, these translations correspond to plane waves, whose decomposition into spherical harmonics naturally leads to a multipole expansion framework for the 3PCF. To accelerate computation, we incorporate density field reconstruction within the framework of multiresolution analysis, enabling efficient summation using either grid-based or particle-based schemes. In addition to the shared computational cost of reconstructing the multipole-decomposed density fields - scaling as (where is the number of grids and is the truncation order of the multipole expansion) - the final summation step achieves a complexity of for the grid-based approach and for the particle-based scheme (where is the support of the basis function and is the number of particles). The proposed multipole algorithm is fully GPU-accelerated and implemented in the open-source toolkit for cosmic statistics. This development enables fast, scalable higher-order clustering analyses for large-volume datasets from current and upcoming cosmological surveys such as Euclid, DESI, LSST, and CSST.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.15209,
title = {An Optimal In-Situ Multipole Algorithm for the Isotropic Three-Point Correlation Functions},
author = {Wenjie Ju and Longlong Feng and Zhiqi Huang and Xin Sun and Weishan Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.15209},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages, 5 figures