Presentation Archive

Prospects for CMB lensing-galaxy clustering cross-correlations and initial condition reconstruction

Marcel Schmittfull (IAS)

April 26, 2018

Abstract: The lensing convergence measurable with future CMB experiments will be highly correlated with the clustering of galaxies that will be observed by imaging surveys such as LSST. I will discuss prospects for using that cross-correlation signal to constrain local primordial non-Gaussianity, the amplitude of matter fluctuations as a function of redshift, halo bias, and possibly the sum of neutrino masses. A key limitation for such analyses and large-scale structure analyses in general is that the mapping from initial conditions to observables is nonlinear for wavenumbers k>0.1h/Mpc. This can destroy cosmological information or move it to non-Gaussian tails of the probability distribution that are difficult to measure. I will describe how we can use recently developed initial condition reconstruction methods to help us recover some of that information in the nonlinear regime.