Hitting the mark: Optimising Marked Power Spectra for Cosmology

TL;DR

This paper identifies the optimal mark function for marked power spectra, significantly improving cosmological parameter constraints by approximately doubling the precision over traditional methods.

Contribution

It determines the optimal form of the mark function for maximizing information gain in cosmology, reducing the search space and outperforming previous mark functions.

Findings

Optimal mark function maximizes information gain

Achieves ~2x smaller errors in σ8

Achieves ~4x smaller errors in Ωm

Abstract

Marked power spectra provide a computationally efficient way to extract non-Gaussian information from the matter density field using the usual analysis tools developed for the power spectrum without the need for explicit calculation of higher-order correlators. In this work, we explore the optimal form of the mark function used for re-weighting the density field, to maximally constrain cosmology. We show that adding to the mark function or multiplying it by a constant leads to no additional information gain, which significantly reduces our search space for optimal marks. We quantify the information gain of this optimal function and compare it against mark functions previously proposed in the literature. We find that we can gain around $\sim2$ times smaller errors in $\sigma_8$ and $\sim4$ times smaller errors in $\Omega_m$ compared to using the traditional power spectrum alone, an improvement of $\sim60\%$ compared to other proposed marks when applied to the same dataset.