Recent Developments in the Analysis of Galaxy Surveys
arXiv:1810.04263
Abstract
These are advanced lecture notes covering recent developments in the methodology used to analyse galaxy surveys. The focus is particularly on direct measurements of the galaxy power spectrum although I also discuss its Fourier transform, the correlation function for comparison. These 2-point statistics, under the assumption that the overdensity field has Gaussian statistics on large-scales, contain the majority of the cosmological signal available from the galaxy distribution. Recent developments in multipole measurements, dealing with systematics, convolving theoretical models with the survey window function, the approximation of covariance matrices, and weighting schemes for measuring evolution with redshift are considered. The focus is on analytic explanation of the issues involved rather than on recent analyses or simulation results.
20 pages, no figures, notes based on lectures presented at the Varenna School, Course 200 "Gravitational Waves and Cosmology", July 2017