English

Rotation method for accelerating multiple-spherical Bessel function integrals against a numerical source function

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2019-12-03 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

A common problem in cosmology is to integrate the product of two or more spherical Bessel functions (sBFs) with different configuration-space arguments against the power spectrum or its square, weighted by powers of wavenumber. Naively computing them scales as Ngp+1N_{\rm g}^{p+1} with pp the number of configuration space arguments and NgN_{\rm g} the grid size, and they cannot be done with Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs). Here we show that by rewriting the sBFs as sums of products of sine and cosine and then using the product to sum identities, these integrals can then be performed using 1-D FFTs with NglogNgN_{\rm g} \log N_{\rm g} scaling. This "rotation" method has the potential to accelerate significantly a number of calculations in cosmology, such as perturbation theory predictions of loop integrals, higher order correlation functions, and analytic templates for correlation function covariance matrices. We implement this approach numerically both in a free-standing, publicly-available \textsc{Python} code and within the larger, publicly-available package \texttt{mcfit}. The rotation method evaluated with direct integrations already offers a factor of 6-10×\times speed-up over the naive approach in our test cases. Using FFTs, which the rotation method enables, then further improves this to a speed-up of \sim10003000×1000-3000\times over the naive approach. The rotation method should be useful in light of upcoming large datasets such as DESI or LSST. In analysing these datasets recomputation of these integrals a substantial number of times, for instance to update perturbation theory predictions or covariance matrices as the input linear power spectrum is changed, will be one piece in a Monte Carlo Markov Chain cosmological parameter search: thus the overall savings from our method should be significant.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.00065,
  title  = {Rotation method for accelerating multiple-spherical Bessel function integrals against a numerical source function},
  author = {Zachary Slepian and Yin Li and Marcel Schmittfull and Zvonimir Vlah},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.00065},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

21 pages, 14 figures, submitted MNRAS; code available at https://github.com/eelregit/sbf_rotation

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:31:36.997Z