On the inadequacy of N-point correlation functions to describe nonlinear cosmological fields: explicit examples and connection to simulations

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that correlation functions are insufficient to fully describe nonlinear cosmological fields like the lognormal field, revealing limitations of traditional statistical methods and connecting these findings to simulation results.

Contribution

It explicitly constructs fields with identical correlation hierarchies to lognormal fields, showing the hierarchy's inadequacy in capturing information in the nonlinear regime.

Findings

Correlation functions fail to describe lognormal fields fully.

Perturbative approaches cannot account for information loss.

Simulations show spectrum contains more information than correlation functions.

Abstract

Motivated by recent results on lognormal statistics showing that the moment hierarchy of a lognormal variable completely fails at capturing its information content in the large variance regime, we discuss in this work the inadequacy of the hierarchy of correlation functions to describe a correlated lognormal field, which provides a roughly accurate description of the non-linear cosmological matter density field. We present families of fields having the same hierarchy of correlation functions than the lognormal field at all orders. This explicitly demonstrates the little studied though known fact that the correlation function hierarchy never provides a complete description of a lognormal field, and that it fails to capture information in the non-linear regime, where other simple observables are left totally unconstrained. We discuss why perturbative, Edgeworth-like approaches to statistics in the non-linear regime, common in cosmology, can never reproduce or predict that effect, and why it is however generic for tailed fields, hinting at a breakdown of the perturbation theory based on the field fluctuations. We make a rough but successful quantitative connection to N-body simulations results, that showed that the spectrum of the log-density field carries more information than the spectrum of the field entering the non-linear regime.