skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Perturbation theory, effective field theory, and oscillations in the power spectrum

Journal Article · · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
 [1];  [2]; ;  [3]
  1. Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94306 (United States)
  2. Physics, Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
  3. Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)

We explore the relationship between the nonlinear matter power spectrum and the various Lagrangian and Standard Perturbation Theories (LPT and SPT). We first look at it in the context of one dimensional (1-d) dynamics, where 1LPT is exact at the perturbative level and one can exactly resum the SPT series into the 1LPT power spectrum. Shell crossings lead to non-perturbative effects, and the PT ignorance can be quantified in terms of their ratio, which is also the transfer function squared in the absence of stochasticity. At the order of PT we work, this parametrization is equivalent to the results of effective field theory (EFT), and can thus be expanded in terms of the same parameters. We find that its radius of convergence is larger than the SPT loop expansion. The same EFT parametrization applies to all SPT loop terms and if stochasticity can be ignored, to all N-point correlators. In 3-d, the LPT structure is considerably more complicated, and we find that LPT models with parametrization motivated by the EFT exhibit running with k and that SPT is generally a better choice. Since these transfer function expansions contain free parameters that change with cosmological model their usefulness for broadband power is unclear. For this reason we test the predictions of these models on baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) and other primordial oscillations, including string monodromy models, for which we ran a series of simulations with and without oscillations. Most models are successful in predicting oscillations beyond their corresponding PT versions, confirming the basic validity of the model. We show that if primordial oscillations are localized to a scale q, the wiggles in power spectrum are approximately suppressed as exp[−k{sup 2}Σ{sup 2}(q)/2], where Σ(q) is rms displacement of particles separated by q, which saturates on large scales, and decreases as q is reduced. No oscillatory features survive past k ∼ 0.5h/Mpc at z = 0.

OSTI ID:
22524912
Journal Information:
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 03; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

On the reach of perturbative methods for dark matter density fields
Journal Article · Tue Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2016 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics · OSTI ID:22524912

On the reach of perturbative descriptions for dark matter displacement fields
Journal Article · Tue Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2016 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics · OSTI ID:22524912

The trispectrum in the Effective Field Theory of Large Scale Structure
Journal Article · Wed Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics · OSTI ID:22524912