Friday, January 6, 2012

1201.1000 (Julien Carron)

Information escaping the correlation hierarchy of the convergence field in the study of cosmological parameters    [PDF]

Julien Carron
Using recent fits to numerical simulations, we show that the entire hierarchy of moments ceases to provide a complete description of the convergence one-point probability density function already for values of the associated matter fluctuations variance as low as 0.1, still in the weak lensing regime. This suggests that the full correlation function hierarchy of the convergence field becomes quickly generically incomplete and a very poor cosmological probe on non linear scales. At the scale of unit variance, only 5 % of the Fisher information content of the one-point probability density function is still contained in its hierarchy of moments, making clear that information escaping the hierarchy is a far stronger effect than information propagating to higher order moments. It follows that the constraints on cosmological parameters achievable through extraction of the entire hierarchy become suboptimal by large amounts. A simple logarithmic mapping makes the moment hierarchy well suited again for parameter extraction, putting 80% of the total information back into the first two and 95% in the first three members.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1000

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