Related papers: Bispectrum covariance in the flat-sky limit
The measurements of the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations enable us to probe the physics of the very early Universe especially at the epoch of inflation. A particular interest lays on the detection…
Cosmological observables rely heavily on summary statistics such as two-point correlation functions. In many practical cases (e.g. the weak-lensing cosmic shear), those correlation functions are estimated from a finite, discrete sample of…
The natural approach to a spectral analysis of data distributed on the sky employs spherical harmonic decomposition. A common problem encountered in practical astronomy is the lack of full sky coverage in the available data. For example,…
Efficient computation of the angular bispectrum is an essential part of modelling large-scale structure observations, but it still remains an extremely challenging task. In this work, we compute the tree-level, unequal-time angular…
Third-order weak lensing statistics are a promising tool for cosmological analyses since they extract cosmological information in the non-Gaussianity of the cosmic large-scale structure. However, such analyses require precise and accurate…
In recent years cosmic shear, the weak gravitational lensing effect by the large-scale structure of the Universe, has proven to be one of the observational pillars on which the cosmological concordance model is founded. Several cosmic shear…
We investigate the bias and error in estimates of the cosmological parameter covariance matrix, due to sampling or modelling the data covariance matrix, for likelihood width and peak scatter estimators. We show that these estimators do not…
We re-examine a genuine power of weak lensing bispectrum tomography for constraining cosmological parameters, when combined with the power spectrum tomography, based on the Fisher information matrix formalism. To account for the full…
Evidence that the Universe may be close to the critical density, required for its expansion eventually to be halted, comes principally from dynamical studies of large-scale structure. These studies either use the observed peculiar velocity…
Super-sample covariance (SSC) is the dominant source of statistical error on large scale structure (LSS) observables for both current and future galaxy surveys. In this work, we concentrate on the SSC of cluster counts, also known as sample…
An improved estimator for the amplitude fnl of local-type non-Gaussianity from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum is discussed. The standard estimator is constructed to be optimal in the zero-signal (i.e., Gaussian) limit.…
We investigate three-point statistics in weak lensing convergence, through the integrated bispectrum. This statistic involves measuring power spectra in patches, and is thus easy to measure, and avoids the complexity of estimating the very…
The next generation of ground-based CMB experiments aim to measure temperature and polarization fluctuations up to $\ell_{\rm max} \approx 5000$ over half of the sky. Combined with Planck data on large scales, this will provide improved…
We revisit the flat-sky approximation for evaluating the angular power spectra of projected random fields by retaining information about the correlations along the line of sight. With broad, overlapping radial window functions, these…
Mechanisms have been proposed that might rotate the linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as it propagates from the surface of last scatter. In the simplest scenario, the rotation will be uniform across the sky, but…
We demonstrate the feasibility to generate surrogates by Fourier-based methods for an incomplete data set. This is performed for the case of a CMB analysis, where astrophysical foreground emission, mainly present in the Galactic plane, is a…
We derive an optimal linear filter to suppress the noise from the COBE DMR sky maps for a given power spectrum. We then apply the filter to the first-year DMR data, after removing pixels within $20^\circ$ of the Galactic plane from the…
Minimum-variance estimators for the parameter fnl that quantifies local-model non-Gaussianity can be constructed from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum (three-point function) and also from the trispectrum (four-point…
COBE has provided us with a whole-sky map of the CBR anisotropies. However, even if the noise level is negligible when the four year COBE data are available, the cosmic variance will prevent us from obtaining information about the Gaussian…
The present spatial distribution of galaxies in the Universe is non-Gaussian, with 40% skewness in 50 Mpc/h spheres, and remarkably little is known about the information encoded in it about cosmological parameters beyond the power spectrum.…