The impact of relativistic effects on cosmological parameter estimation

TL;DR

Future cosmological surveys must account for relativistic effects like lensing magnification to avoid biases in parameter estimation, while general relativistic corrections are less impactful except for primordial non-Gaussianity.

Contribution

This study quantifies the information content and potential biases from relativistic effects in future large-scale structure surveys, highlighting the importance of modeling magnification and source count slopes.

Findings

Magnification lensing significantly biases parameters if neglected.

Accurate knowledge of source count slope $s(z)$ is crucial, requiring 5-10% precision.

General relativistic corrections are generally negligible except for primordial non-Gaussianity.

Abstract

Future surveys will access large volumes of space and hence very long wavelength fluctuations of the matter density and gravitational field. It has been argued that the set of secondary effects that affect the galaxy distribution, relativistic in nature, will bring new, complementary cosmological constraints. We study this claim in detail by focusing on a subset of wide-area future surveys: Stage-4 cosmic microwave background experiments and photometric redshift surveys. In particular, we look at the magnification lensing contribution to galaxy clustering and general relativistic corrections to all observables. We quantify the amount of information encoded in these effects in terms of the tightening of the final cosmological constraints as well as the potential bias in inferred parameters associated with neglecting them. We do so for a wide range of cosmological parameters, covering neutrino masses, standard dark-energy parametrizations and scalar-tensor gravity theories. Our results show that, while the effect of lensing magnification to number counts does not contain a significant amount of information when galaxy clustering is combined with cosmic shear measurements, this contribution does play a significant role in biasing estimates on a host of parameter families if unaccounted for. Since the amplitude of the magnification term is controlled by the slope of the source number counts with apparent magnitude, $s(z)$, we also estimate the accuracy to which this quantity must be known to avoid systematic parameter biases, finding that future surveys will need to determine $s(z)$ to the $\sim$5-10\% level. On the contrary, large-scale general-relativistic corrections are irrelevant both in terms of information content and parameter bias for most cosmological parameters, but significant for the level of primordial non-Gaussianity.