Recovering Subtle Cosmological Information with the Zel'dovich-inspired Transform

Abstract

Extracting cosmological information from nonlinear and non-Gaussian large-scale structure remains a major challenge. We introduce the Zel'dovich-inspired (ZI) transform, a simple one-parameter local nonlinear transform in which $\eta$ controls the weighting of higher-order information in the transformed density field. For $\eta \ge 3$, the transform can substantially suppress gravitational non-Gaussianity. Using real-space matter density fields from the \textsc{Quijote} suite and Fisher analysis, we find that the joint data vector of three transformed-field power spectra with $\{\eta =\infty ,6,3\}$, denoted $P_{\mathrm{ZI}}$, reduces marginalized errors for all parameters considered. The improvements range from several-fold for some $\Lambda$CDM parameters to factors of 290 for local primordial non-Gaussianity and 107 for the summed neutrino mass. Tests on independent fiducial simulations yield nearly unbiased parameter estimates. Compared with other state-of-the-art summary statistics, $P_{\mathrm{ZI}}$ provides tighter cosmological constraints.

arXiv comment9 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables; comments welcomed