English

Decorrelating the Power Spectrum of Galaxies

Astrophysics 2009-10-07 v4

Abstract

It is shown how to decorrelate the (prewhitened) power spectrum measured from a galaxy survey into a set of high resolution uncorrelated band-powers. The treatment includes nonlinearity, but not redshift distortions. Amongst the infinitely many possible decorrelation matrices, the square root of the Fisher matrix, or a scaled version thereof, offers a particularly good choice, in the sense that the band-power windows are narrow, approximately symmetric, and well-behaved in the presence of noise. We use this method to compute band-power windows for, and the information content of, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, and the IRAS 1.2 Jy Survey.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9905192,
  title  = {Decorrelating the Power Spectrum of Galaxies},
  author = {A. J. S. Hamilton and Max Tegmark},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9905192},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

11 pages, including 8 embedded PostScript figures. Minor changes to agree with published version