Testing the assumptions of the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure

Autor(en)
Mandar Karandikar, Cristiano Porciani, Oliver Hahn
Abstrakt

The Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure (EFTofLSS) attempts to amend some of the shortcomings of the traditional perturbative methods used in cosmology. It models the evolution of long-wavelength perturbations above a cutoff scale without the need for a detailed description of the short-wavelength ones. Short-scale physics is encoded in the coefficients of a series of operators composed of the long-wavelength fields, and ordered in a systematic expansion. As applied in the literature, the EFTofLSS corrects a summary statistic (such as the power spectrum) calculated from standard perturbation theory by matching it to $N$-body simulations or observations. This `bottom-up' construction is remarkably successful in extending the range of validity of perturbation theory. In this work, we compare this framework to a `top-down' approach, which estimates the EFT coefficients from the stress tensor of an $N$-body simulation, and propagates the corrections to the summary statistic. We consider simple initial conditions, viz. two sinusoidal, plane-parallel density perturbations with substantially different frequencies and amplitudes. We find that the leading EFT correction to the power spectrum in the top-down model is in excellent agreement with that inferred from the bottom-up approach which, by construction, provides an exact match to the numerical data. This result is robust to changes in the wavelength separation between the two linear perturbations. However, in our setup, the leading EFT coefficient does not always grow linearly with the cosmic expansion factor as assumed in the literature based on perturbative considerations. Instead, it decreases after orbit crossing takes place.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Astrophysik, Institut für Mathematik
Externe Organisation(en)
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Journal
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP)
Band
2024
Anzahl der Seiten
36
ISSN
1475-7516
Publikationsdatum
01-2024
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
103044 Kosmologie
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/b66917c0-0504-4054-b440-c19d63b0ae6a