Related papers: The copula of the cosmological matter density fiel…
Using cosmological N-body simulations, we study the abundance of local maxima (peaks) and minima (dips) identified in the smoothed distribution of halos and dark matter (DM) on scales of $10-100$s Mpcs. The simulations include Gaussian and…
Likelihood fitting to two-point clustering statistics made from galaxy surveys usually assumes a multivariate normal distribution for the measurements, with justification based on the central limit theorem given the large number of…
We discuss models of primordial density perturbations where the non-Gaussianity is strongly scale-dependent. In particular, the non-Gaussianity may have a sharp cut-off and be very suppressed on large cosmological scales, but sizeable on…
Perturbations in a universe with matter and cosmological constant are computed in terms of the primordial scalar perturbation up to second order. The calculation is easy -- a generalization of the spherical dust solution. Our expression…
We use cosmological N-body simulations to investigate whether measurements of the moments of large-scale structure can yield constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity. We measure the variance, skewness, and kurtosis of the evolved density…
We extend the matter bounce scenario to a more general theory in which the background dynamics and cosmological perturbations are generated by a $k$-essence scalar field with an arbitrary sound speed. When the sound speed is small, the…
We discuss the probability distributions of Fourier modes of cosmological density fields using the central limit theorem as it applies to weighted integrals of random fields. It is shown that if the cosmological principle holds in a certain…
We present a comparative study of the accuracy and precision of correlation function methods and full-field inference in cosmological data analysis. To do so, we examine a Bayesian hierarchical model that predicts log-normal fields and…
(abridged) We study the validity of the approximation of a Gaussian cosmic shear likelihood. We estimate the true likelihood for a fiducial cosmological model from a large set of ray-tracing simulations and investigate the impact of…
Random fields in nature often have, to a good approximation, Gaussian characteristics. For such fields, the relative densities of umbilical points -- topological defects which can be classified into three types -- have certain fixed values.…
The late universe contains a wealth of information about fundamental physics and gravity, wrapped up in non-Gaussian fields. To make use of as much information as possible it is necessary to go beyond two-point statistics. Rather than going…
The spatial curvature of the universe is not yet known. Even though at present the Universe is very close to being essentially flat and most signatures of curvature appear to have been diluted by inflation, if the number of e-foldings…
One way of recovering information about the initial conditions of the Universe is by measuring features of the cosmological density field which are preserved during gravitational evolution and galaxy formation. In this paper we study the…
The concentrations of the cuspy dark matter halos predicted by simulations of cold dark matter are related to the cosmology in which the halos form. Observational constraints on halo concentration therefore map into constraints on…
Weak gravitational lensing observations probe the spectrum and evolution of density fluctuations and the cosmological parameters which govern them. At low redshifts, the non-linear gravitational evolution of large scale structure produces a…
Two recent papers have claimed detection of non-Gaussian features in the COBE DMR sky maps of the cosmic microwave background. We confirm these results, but argue that Gaussianity is still not convincingly ruled out. Since a score of…
We study Newtonian cosmological perturbation theory from a field theoretical point of view. We derive a path integral representation for the cosmological evolution of stochastic fluctuations. Our main result is the closed form of the…
We give an analytical form for the weighted correlation function of peaks in a Gaussian random field. In a cosmological context, this approach strictly describes the formation bias and is the main result here. Nevertheless, we show its…
Many applications of Gaussian random fields and Gaussian random processes are limited by the computational complexity of evaluating the probability density function, which involves inverting the relevant covariance matrix. In this work, we…
To eliminate gravitational non-Gaussianity, we introduce the $\mathcal{Z}$-$\kappa$ transform, a simple local nonlinear transform of the matter density field that emulates the inverse of nonlinear gravitational evolution. Using $N$-body…