Unbiased analysis of primordial non-Gaussianity: the multipoles of the full relativistic power spectrum

Abstract

A major goal of ongoing and future cosmological surveys of the large-scale structure is to measure local type primordial non-Gaussianity in the galaxy power spectrum through the scale-dependent bias. General relativistic effects have been shown to be degenerate with this measurement and therefore one needs to consider a non-Newtonian approach. In this work, we develop a consistent framework to compute integrated effects, including lensing convergence, time delay, and integrated Sachs-Wolfe, along with the local relativistic projection and wide-separation corrections in the multipoles of the power spectrum. We show that, for a Euclid-like Hα-line galaxy survey and a MegaMapper-like Lyman-break galaxy survey, ignoring these effects leads to a bias on the best fit measurement of the amplitude of primordial non-Gaussianity, f NL, of around 3σ and 20σ respectively. When we include these corrections, the uncertainty in our knowledge of the luminosity function leads to further uncertainty in our measurement of f NL. However, we show that this degeneracy can be partly mitigated by using a bright-faint multi-tracer analysis, where the observed galaxy sample is subdivided into two separate populations based on luminosity. This provides a 15–20% improvement on the forecasted constraints of local type f NL. In addition, we present a novel calculation of the full multi-tracer covariance with the inclusion of wide-separation corrections. All of these results are implemented in the Python code CosmoWAP.

Description

Citation

Addis, C., Guedezounme, S.L., Hammond, J., Clarkson, C., Montano, F., Camera, S., Jolicoeur, S. and Maartens, R., 2026. Unbiased analysis of primordial non-Gaussianity: the multipoles of the full relativistic power spectrum. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2026(06), p.039.