Effective Field Theory for Large-Scale Structure

There is no source for cosmic vorticity within the cold dark matter cosmology. However, vorticity has been observed in the universe, especially on the scales of clusters, filaments, galaxies, etc. Recent results from high-resolution general relativistic N-body simulation show that the vorticity power spectrum dominates over the power spectrum of the divergence of the peculiar velocity field on scales where the effective field theory of large-scale structure breaks down. Incidentally, this scale also corresponds to the scale where shell-crossing occurs. Several studies have suggested a link between shell crossing in the dark matter fluid and the vorticity generation in the universe, however, no clear proof of how it works within general relativity exists yet. We describe for the first time how vorticity is generated in a universe such as ours with expanding and collapsing regions. We show how vorticity is generated at the boundary of the expanding and collapsing regions. Our result indicates that the amplitude of the generated vorticity is determined by the jump in gradients of the gravitational potential, pressure and the expansion rate at the boundary. In addition, we argue that the presence of vorticity in the matter fields implies a non-vanishing magnetic part of the Weyl tensor. This has implications for the generation of Maxwell's magnetic field and the dynamics of clusters. The impact of accelerated expansion of the universe and the existence of causal limit for massive particles are discussed

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Vorticity generation in cosmology and the role of shell crossing

Umeh

2023

“…This follows the analyses in [36,108] restricted to the power spectrum multipoles. We model the nonlinear galaxy power spectrum in redshift space as implemented in CLASS-PT [111] (based on CLASS [112]) which follows the analyses of [113,114] based on the effective field theory of large-scale structure (EFTofLSS) [115][116][117][118] (see [17,119] for recent reviews) and galaxy bias expansion [52], including the Alcock-Paczynski effect. We additionally include the non-Gaussian contributions from the scale-dependent bias (2.21) due to f ∆ NL ̸ = 0 similar to the analyses in [36,108].…”

Section: Boss Dr12 Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Light fields during inflation from BOSS and future galaxy surveys

Green,

Guo,

Han

et al. 2024

Primordial non-Gaussianity generated by additional fields present during inflation offers a compelling observational target for galaxy surveys. These fields are of significant theoretical interest since they offer a window into particle physics in the inflaton sector. They also violate the single-field consistency conditions and induce a scale-dependent bias in the galaxy power spectrum. In this paper, we explore this particular signal for light scalar fields and study the prospects for measuring it with galaxy surveys. We find that the sensitivities of current and future surveys are remarkably stable for different configurations, including between spectroscopic and photometric redshift measurements. This is even the case at non-zero masses where the signal is not obviously localized on large scales. For realistic galaxy number densities, we demonstrate that the redshift range and galaxy bias of the sample have the largest impact on the sensitivity in the power spectrum. These results additionally motivated us to explore the potentially enhanced sensitivity of Vera Rubin Observatory's LSST through multi-tracer analyses. Finally, we apply this understanding to current data from the last data release of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS DR12) and place new constraints on light fields coupled to the inflaton.

Testing the assumptions of the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure

Karandikar,

Porciani,

Hahn

2024

The Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure (EFTofLSS) attempts to amend some of the shortcomings of the traditional perturbative methods used in cosmology. It models the evolution of long-wavelength perturbations above a cutoff scale without the need for a detailed description of the short-wavelength ones. Short-scale physics is encoded in the coefficients of a series of operators composed of the long-wavelength fields, and ordered in a systematic expansion. As applied in the literature, the EFTofLSS corrects a summary statistic (such as the power spectrum) calculated from standard perturbation theory by matching it to N-body simulations or observations. This `bottom-up' construction is remarkably successful in extending the range of validity of perturbation theory. In this work, we compare this framework to a `top-down' approach, which estimates the EFT coefficients from the stress tensor of an N-body simulation, and propagates the corrections to the summary statistic. We consider simple initial conditions, viz. two sinusoidal, plane-parallel density perturbations with substantially different frequencies and amplitudes. We find that the leading EFT correction to the power spectrum in the top-down model is in excellent agreement with that inferred from the bottom-up approach which, by construction, provides an exact match to the numerical data. This result is robust to changes in the wavelength separation between the two linear perturbations. However, in our setup, the leading EFT coefficient does not always grow linearly with the cosmic expansion factor as assumed in the literature based on perturbative considerations. Instead, it decreases after orbit crossing takes place.