Hybrid modeling of redshift space distortions

TL;DR

This paper develops an accurate, simulation-calibrated power spectrum template for redshift space distortions, enabling precise measurement of cosmic structure growth and gravity on large scales.

Contribution

It introduces a calibrated, perturbation-theory-inspired power spectrum template for RSD that accounts for non-perturbative effects and can be applied across different cosmologies.

Findings

Achieves 1% accuracy in growth function estimation at k<0.18 h/Mpc.

Calibrates uncertainties in perturbation theory using simulations.

Demonstrates applicability across different cosmological models.

Abstract

The observed power spectrum in redshift space appears distorted due to the peculiar motion of galaxies, known as redshift-space distortions (RSD). While all the effects in RSD are accounted for by the simple mapping formula from real to redshift spaces, accurately modeling redshift-space power spectrum is rather difficult due to the non-perturbative properties of the mapping. Still, however, a perturbative treatment may be applied to the power spectrum at large-scales, and on top of a careful modeling of the Finger-of-God effect caused by the small-scale random motion, the redshift-space power spectrum can be expressed as a series of expansion which contains the higher-order correlations of density and velocity fields. In our previous work [JCAP 8 (Aug., 2016) 050], we provide a perturbation-theory inspired model for power spectrum in which the higher-order correlations are evaluated directly from the cosmological $N$-body simulations. Adopting a simple Gaussian ansatz for Finger-of-God effect, the model is shown to quantitatively describe the simulation results. Here, we further push this approach, and present an accurate power spectrum template which can be used to estimate the growth of structure as a key to probe gravity on cosmological scales. Based on the simulations, we first calibrate the uncertainties and systematics in the pertrubation theory calculation in a fiducial cosmological model. Then, using the scaling relations, the calibrated power spectrum template is applied to a different cosmological model. We demonstrate that with our new template, the best-fitted growth functions are shown to reproduce the fiducial values in a good accuracy of 1 \% at $k<0.18 \hompc$ for cosmologies with different Hubble parameters.