The full-sky Spherical Fourier-Bessel power spectrum in general relativity

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive formalism for analyzing galaxy clustering using the Spherical Fourier-Bessel approach, incorporating all relativistic effects and avoiding common approximations, to improve accuracy in cosmological measurements.

Contribution

It extends previous models by including all projection and GR effects, implementing an efficient numerical method, and proposing a new way to detect relativistic corrections in galaxy surveys.

Findings

Neglecting GR corrections biases $f_{NL}$ estimates.

Relativistic effects can significantly impact galaxy clustering analysis.

A full-sky 3D formalism is necessary to detect relativistic signals.

Abstract

We present a formalism for analyzing galaxy clustering on the lightcone with the 2-point correlation in the Spherical Fourier-Bessel (SFB) formalism, which is a natural choice to account for all wide-angle and relativistic (GR) effects. We extend previous studies by including all projection and GR effects, developing an efficient numerical implementation that avoids the use of the Limber approximation, includes multi-bins correlations and a full non-diagonal covariance. Using this formalism, we investigate the impact of neglecting GR corrections, and in particular how much this could bias measurements of the non-Gaussianity parameter $f_\mathrm{NL}$. Our results show that not including relativistic projection terms can systematically and non-negligibly bias estimates of $f_\mathrm{NL}$. The exact results depend on survey specifications and galaxy population properties, but we stress that a bias will generally be present. Finally, we develop a novel prescription for cross-bin correlations that allow to search for a clean signal of relativistic corrections, and show that this requires the use of the 3D full-sky formalism.