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Matter power spectrum and the challenge of percent accuracy

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arxiv 1503.05920 v3 pith:C7BAK75Z submitted 2015-03-19 astro-ph.CO

classification astro-ph.CO
keywords percentpowerspectrumaccuracyprecisionrequiredsimulationsthree
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abstract

Future galaxy surveys require one percent precision in the theoretical knowledge of the power spectrum over a large range including very nonlinear scales. While this level of accuracy is easily obtained in the linear regime with perturbation theory, it represents a serious challenge for small scales where numerical simulations are required. In this paper we quantify the precision of present-day $N$-body methods, identifying main potential error sources from the set-up of initial conditions to the measurement of the final power spectrum. We directly compare three widely used $N$-body codes, Ramses, Pkdgrav3, and Gadget3 which represent three main discretisation techniques: the particle-mesh method, the tree method, and a hybrid combination of the two. For standard run parameters, the codes agree to within one percent at $k\leq1$ $h\,\rm Mpc^{-1}$ and to within three percent at $k\leq10$ $h\,\rm Mpc^{-1}$. We also consider the bispectrum and show that the reduced bispectra agree at the sub-percent level for $k\leq 2$ $h\,\rm Mpc^{-1}$. In a second step, we quantify potential errors due to initial conditions, box size, and resolution using an extended suite of simulations performed with our fastest code Pkdgrav3. We demonstrate that the simulation box size should not be smaller than $L=0.5$ $h^{-1}\rm Gpc$ to avoid systematic finite-volume effects (while much larger boxes are required to beat down the statistical sample variance). Furthermore, a maximum particle mass of $M_{\rm p}=10^{9}$ $h^{-1}\rm M_{\odot}$ is required to conservatively obtain one percent precision of the matter power spectrum. As a consequence, numerical simulations covering large survey volumes of upcoming missions such as DES, LSST, and Euclid will need more than a trillion particles to reproduce clustering properties at the targeted accuracy.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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    N-body simulations of IDE with Q=ξHρ_x show scale-dependent deviations in the matter power spectrum, density morphology, and halo abundance that standard ΛCDM-calibrated prescriptions cannot reproduce.

  3. Modeling nonlinear scales for dynamical dark energy cosmologies with COLA

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    COLA-based hybrid emulator reproduces nonlinear power spectrum boosts in w0wa models to <2% error vs EuclidEmulator2 and produces <0.3σ shifts in LSST-like cosmic shear parameter constraints.

  4. Einstein-Vlasov Calculations of Structure Formation

    astro-ph.CO 2019-08 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

    Full Einstein-Vlasov simulations show Newtonian N-body collapse is faster than general relativity for extreme density perturbations, but accurate at subpercent level for standard cosmological amplitudes.

  5. Cosmological N-body simulations: a challenge for scalable generative models

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    A multi-scale patch-based Wasserstein GAN generates 256^3 voxel N-body dark matter cubes as a benchmark baseline, but statistical fidelity, especially for rare high-density peaks, is not yet sufficient for cosmology.

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    For dark matter halos at z=1, a tree-level three-parameter bias model with Poissonian shot noise describes the halo bispectrum up to k about 0.08 h/Mpc, and Bayesian model selection disfavours local Eulerian and Lagra...

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