Wide-angle and relativistic effects in Fourier-space clustering statistics

TL;DR

This paper develops a perturbative approach to evaluate wide-angle and relativistic effects in Fourier-space galaxy clustering statistics, analyzing their impact on power spectrum and bispectrum measurements and their implications for primordial non-Gaussianity.

Contribution

It introduces a simple perturbative method for fast calculation of wide-angle and relativistic corrections in galaxy clustering statistics, including nonlinear effects and bispectrum multipoles.

Findings

Wide-angle effects can significantly contaminate local fNL measurements.

Imaginary multipoles in the bispectrum arise from wide-angle effects, not just relativistic corrections.

Leading order corrections to bispectrum multipoles can induce apparent local fNL of order unity.

Abstract

Galaxy power spectrum and bispectrum signals are distorted by peculiar velocities and other relativistic effects arising from a perturbed spacetime background. In addition, study of correlation functions of tracers in Fourier space is often done in the plane-parallel approximation under which it is assumed that line-of-sight (LOS) vectors are parallel. In this work we show that a simple perturbative procedure can be employed for a fast evaluation of beyond plane-parallel (wide-angle) corrections to the power spectrum and bispectrum. We also show that evolution of linear matter density fluctuations in a relativistic context can be found from a simple method. For the power spectrum at linear level, we compare leading order wide-angle contributions to multipoles of the galaxy power spectrum with those from non-integrated and integrated relativistic corrections and estimate their possible contamination on local fNL measurements to be of order a few. We also compute wide-angle corrections in the presence of nonlinear terms at one-loop order. For the bispectrum, we show that wide-angle effects alone, even with fully symmetric choices of LOS, give rise to imaginary, odd-parity multipoles of the galaxy bispectrum (dipole, octupole, etc.) which are in many cases larger than previously known ones of relativistic origin. We calculate these contributions and provide an estimator for measuring the leading order bispectrum dipole from data, using a symmetric LOS definition. Finally, we calculate the leading order corrections to multipoles of real plane-parallel bispectrum multipoles and estimate the apparent local fNL induced to be of order unity.