2025/03/07 by Cristiano Germani, Germani, Cristiano, Mohammad Ali Gorji +5 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Random lasers and scattering media #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.05434
openalex publication_date 2025/03/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We formulate the statistics of peaks of non-Gaussian random fields and implement it to study the sphericity of peaks. For non-Gaussianity of the local type, we present a general formalism valid regardless of how large the deviation from Gaussian statistics is. For general types of non-Gaussianity, we provide a framework that applies to any system with a given power spectrum and the corresponding bispectrum in the regime in which contributions from higher-order correlators can be neglected. We present an explicit expression for the most probable values of the sphericity parameters, including the effect of non-Gaussianity on the shape. We show that the effects of small perturbative non-Gaussianity on the sphericity parameters are negligible, as they are even smaller than the subleading Gaussian corrections. In contrast, we find that large non-Gaussianity can significantly distort the peak configurations, making them much less spherical.