The cosmological analysis of the SDSS/BOSS data from the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure

Abstract

The Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure is a formalism that allows us to predict the clustering of Cosmological Large-Scale Structure in the mildly non-linear regime in an accurate and reliable way. After validating our technique against several sets of numerical simulations, we perform the analysis for the cosmological parameters of the DR12 BOSS data. We assume ΛCDM, a fixed value of the baryon/dark-matter ratio, Ω b /Ω c , and of the tilt of the primordial power spectrum, n s , and no significant input from numerical simulations. By using the one-loop power spectrum multipoles, we measure the primordial amplitude of the power spectrum, A s , the abundance of matter, Ω m , and the Hubble parameter, H 0 , to about 13%, 3.2% and 3.2% respectively, obtaining ln(10 10 A s ) = 2.72 ± 0.13, Ω m = 0.309 ± 0.010, H 0 = 68.5 ± 2.2 km/(s Mpc) at 68% confidence level. If we then add a CMB prior on the sound horizon, the error bar on H 0 is reduced to 1.6%. These results are a substantial qualitative and quantitative improvement with respect to former analyses, and suggest that the EFTofLSS is a powerful instrument to extract cosmological information from Large-Scale Structure.

Constraining early dark energy with large-scale structure

“…Thus, the BAO measurements would not be biased even if a reasonable cosmology-dependent fiducial template were used [51]. 5 These tools have already been successfully used to constrain the base ΛCDM model using the BOSS data [20,21], verified in a blind simulation challenge [54], and applied to various extensions of the ΛCDM model, including massive neutrinos [55][56][57], varying number of relativistic degrees of freedom [57], and dynamical dark energy [20,52].…”

“…Similarly, the combination of Dark Energy Survey (DES) [18] data and BOSS BAO data gives H 0 ¼ 67.4 þ1.1 −1.2 km=s=Mpc [19]. Measurements of the Hubble constant from galaxy clustering alone (without the Lyα data) can also be done using the full shape (FS) of the galaxy power spectrum [20][21][22][23]. In particular, the joint FS þ BAO data from BOSS yields H 0 ¼ 68.6 AE 1.1 km=s=Mpc [23], in excellent agreement with the CMB result.…”

“…First, the consistent formulation of perturbation theory has been finalized in the form of the effective field theory (EFT) of LSS (see Refs. [20,21] and references therein). Various ingredients of this approach (e.g., UV counterterms and IR resummation) have been independently derived in many different setups.…”

Nonlinear perturbation theory extension of the Boltzmann code CLASS

“…[13], while the analysis of Ref. [75] uses the a 2 μ 2 k 2 contribution in its model. As it can be seen from these two papers, the particular choice does not impact the inference of cosmological parameters.…”

“…We plan on improving our BOSS likelihood in the future, e.g., by using the Fourier-space window function along the lines of Ref. [75] and the analytic covariance matrix of Ref. [117].…”