On the total cosmological information in galaxy clustering: an analytical approach

Abstract

Beyond the linear regime of structure formation, part of cosmological information encoded in galaxy clustering becomes inaccessible to the usual power spectrum. "Sufficient statistics", A*, were introduced recently to recapture the lost, and ultimately extract all, cosmological information. We present analytical approximations for the A* and traditional power spectra as well as for their covariance matrices in order to calculate analytically their cosmological information content in the context of Fisher information theory. Our approach allows the precise quantitative comparison of the techniques with each other and to the total information in the data, and provides insights into sufficient statistics. In particular, we find that while the A* power spectrum has a similar shape to the usual galaxy power spectrum, its amplitude is strongly modulated by small scale statistics. This effect is mostly responsible for the ability of the A* power spectrum to recapture the information lost for the usual power spectrum. We use our framework to forecast the best achievable cosmological constraints for projected surveys as a function of their galaxy density, and compare the information content of the two power spectra. We find that sufficient statistics extract all cosmological information, resulting in an approximately factor of ~2 gain for dense projected surveys at low redshift. This increase in the effective volume of projected surveys is consistent with previous numerical calculations.