Efficient Cosmological Analysis of the SDSS/BOSS data from the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient method for analyzing SDSS/BOSS cosmological data using the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure, enabling precise parameter estimation with reduced computational effort.

Contribution

The authors develop a Taylor expansion approach around a reference cosmology to streamline the analysis of galaxy power spectra within the EFT framework, applied to BOSS data.

Findings

Measured cosmological parameters with specified uncertainties.

Validated the efficiency of the Taylor expansion method for large-scale structure analysis.

Released a public code for cosmological data analysis.

Abstract

The precision of the cosmological data allows us to accurately approximate the predictions for cosmological observables by Taylor expanding up to a low order the dependence on the cosmological parameters around a reference cosmology. By applying this observation to the redshift-space one-loop galaxy power spectrum of the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure, we analyze the BOSS DR12 data by scanning over all the parameters of $\Lambda$CDM cosmology with massive neutrinos. We impose several sets of priors, the widest of which is just a Big Bang Nucleosynthesis prior on the current fractional energy density of baryons, $\Omega_b h^2$, and a bound on the sum of neutrino masses to be less than 0.9 eV. In this case we measure the primordial amplitude of the power spectrum, $A_s$, the abundance of matter, $\Omega_m$, the Hubble parameter, $H_0$, and the tilt of the primordial power spectrum, $n_s$, to about $19\%$, $5.7\%$, $2.2\%$ and $7.3\%$ respectively, obtaining $\ln ( 10^{10} A_s) =2.91\pm 0.19$, $\Omega_m=0.314\pm 0.018$, $H_0=68.7\pm 1.5$ km/(s Mpc) and $n_s=0.979\pm 0.071$ at $68\%$ confidence level. A public code is released with this preprint.