Cosmic tidal reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework and simulation tests for cosmic tidal reconstruction, enabling the recovery of large-scale density fields from small-scale anisotropic distortions caused by tidal fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to reconstruct large-scale density and tidal fields from small-scale anisotropic distortions in the matter correlation function.

Findings

Reconstruction accuracy with cross-correlation coefficient > 0.9 on large scales

Effective for scales up to k ≈ 0.1 h/Mpc

Useful for 21cm intensity mapping surveys

Abstract

The gravitational coupling of a long-wavelength tidal field with small-scale density fluctuations leads to anisotropic distortions of the locally measured small-scale matter correlation function. Since the local correlation function is known to be statistically isotropic in the absence of such tidal interactions, the tidal distortions can be used to reconstruct the long-wavelength tidal field and large-scale density field in analogy with the cosmic microwave background lensing reconstruction. In this paper we present the theoretical framework of cosmic tidal reconstruction and test the reconstruction in numerical simulations. We find that the density field on large scales can be reconstructed with good accuracy and the cross-correlation coefficient between the reconstructed density field and the original density field is greater than 0.9 on large scales $(k\lesssim0.1\ h/\mathrm{Mpc})$, with the filter scale $\sim1.25\ \mathrm{Mpc}/h$. This is useful in the 21cm intensity mapping survey, where the long-wavelength radial modes are lost due to a foreground subtraction process.