Tuesday

Future galaxy surveys of the large-scale structure in the Universe will provide a wealth of new data and make it possible to use higher-order statistics beyond the power spectrum, such as the bispectrum (or 3-point correlation function), to constrain galaxy clustering, the standard LCDM cosmology, and many of its possible extensions. However, it may be preferable to use recently devised alternative statistics, such as the modal decomposition, line correlation function, or position-dependent power spectrum, to recover most of the information contained within the bispectrum while avoiding a more challenging bispectrum analysis. One of the main challenges to using the bispectrum as a cosmological probe is that it typically has many more bins than the power spectrum, requiring many more simulations or mocks for accurate data covariance matrices. The alternative statistics provide a way of compressing the clustering information of the bispectrum into fewer bins, while still retaining most of the bispectrum's constraining power. I will present work in which we have used N-body simulations and theoretical models for the clustering of dark matter to predict whether these alternate statistics can constrain a basic set of cosmological parameters as strongly as the bispectrum.