Cosmology & LSS - goals
Power spectrum: measure the shape of P(k) on scales up to 500 Mpc to constrain the nature of the dark matter and the mass density ? (CDM-like models have power spectrum shape parameter ? ? ?h).
Redshift-space distortions: measure the mass density ? and bias factor (b=?g/?m) in the form ???0.6/b.
Higher-order statistics (e.g. bispectrum, topological genus curve) allow us to…
- measure ? and b separately, and test models of galaxy formation (linear/peaks/stochastic bias);
- investigate the non-linear evolution of collapsed structures on small scales;
- test if the primordial density fluctuations were a Gaussian random field (as predicted by inflation).