Forward vs Backward: Improving BAO Constraints with Field-Level Inference

2025/05/19 by Babić, Ivana, Schmidt, Fabian, Tucci, Beatriz · 3 citations
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.13588

Abstract

We present results of field-level inference of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale r_s on rest-frame dark matter halo catalogs. Our field-level constraint on r_s is obtained by explicitly sampling the initial conditions along with the bias and noise parameters via the LEFTfield EFT-based forward model. Comparing with a standard reconstruction pipeline applied to the same data and over the same scales, the field-level constraint on the BAO scale improves by a factor of ∼ 1.2-1.4 over standard BAO reconstruction. We point to a surprisingly simple source of the additional information.

Citations

• The Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (CLASS) I: Overview

Cited by

• Cosmology inference with perturbative forward modeling at the field level: a comparison with joint power spectrum and bispectrum analyses
• Equivalence of the field-level inference and conventional analyses on large scales
• Scale-dependent bias and mode coupling in redshift-space clustering near the BAO scale

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