Relativistic matter bispectrum of cosmic structures on the light cone

TL;DR

This paper develops a relativistic simulation pipeline to accurately model the matter bispectrum on ultra-large scales, incorporating effects of general relativity and residual radiation, crucial for upcoming cosmological surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a relativistic simulation framework that consistently includes relativistic effects in modeling the matter bispectrum on the light cone, improving gauge-invariance and accuracy for large-scale structure analysis.

Findings

Relativistic effects scale inversely with multipole, reaching 10% at low multipoles.

Pure relativistic bispectrum detected at ~3 sigma significance.

Relativistic effects contribute up to 3-10% in different bispectrum limits.

Abstract

Upcoming surveys of cosmic structures will probe scales close to the cosmological horizon, which opens up new opportunities for testing the cosmological concordance model to high accuracy. In particular, constraints on the squeezed bispectrum could rule out the single-field hypothesis during inflation. However, the squeezed bispectrum is also sensitive to dynamical effects of general relativity as well as interactions of matter with residual radiation from the early Universe. In this paper, we present a relativistic simulation pipeline that includes these relativistic effects consistently. We produce light cones and calculate the observed number counts of cold dark matter for five redshift bins between $z=0.55$-$2.25$. We compare the relativistic results against reference Newtonian simulations by means of angular power- and bispectra. We find that the dynamical relativistic effects scale roughly inversely proportional to the multipole in the angular power spectrum, with a maximum amplitude of $10\%$ for $\ell \lesssim 5$. By using a smoothing method applied to the binned bispectrum we detect the Newtonian bispectrum with very high significance. The purely relativistic part of the matter bispectrum is detected with a significance of $\sim 3\,\sigma$, mostly limited by cosmic variance. We find that the pure dynamical relativistic effects accounts for up to $3\%$ and $10\%$ of the total amplitude, respectively in the squeezed and equilateral limits. Our relativistic pipeline for modelling ultra-large scales yields gauge-independent results as we compute observables consistently on the past light cone, while the Newtonian treatment employs approximations that leave some residual gauge dependence. A gauge-invariant approach is required in order to meet the expected level of precision of forthcoming probes of cosmic structures on ultra-large scales.