Taming assembly bias for primordial non-gaussianity

Abstract

Primordial non-Gaussianity of the local type induces a strong scale-dependent bias on the clustering of halos in the late-time Universe. This signature is particularly promising to provide constraints on the non-Gaussianity parameter fNL from galaxy surveys, as the bias amplitude grows with scale and becomes important on large, linear scales. However, there is a well-known degeneracy between the real prize, the fNL parameter, and the (non-Gaussian) assembly bias i.e., the halo formation history-dependent contribution to the amplitude of the signal, which could seriously compromise the ability of large-scale structure surveys to constrain fNL. We show how the assembly bias can be modeled and constrained, thus almost completely recovering the power of galaxy surveys to competitively constrain primordial non-Gaussianity. In particular, studying hydrodynamical simulations, we find that a proxy for the halo properties that determine assembly bias can be constructed from photometric properties of galaxies. Using a prior on the assembly bias guided by this proxy degrades the statistical errors on fNL only mildly compared to an ideal case where the assembly bias is perfectly known. The systematic error on fNL that the proxy induces can be safely kept under control.