Wide-angle and relativistic effects in Fourier-space clustering statistics

Galaxy power spectrum and bispectrum signals are distorted by peculiar velocities and other relativistic effects arising from a perturbed spacetime background. In addition, study of correlation functions of tracers in Fourier space is often done in the plane-parallel approximation, under which it is assumed that line-of -sight (LOS) vectors are parallel. In this work, we show that a simple perturbative procedure can be employed for a fast evaluation of beyond plane-parallel (wide-angle) corrections to the power spectrum and bispectrum. We also show that evolution of linear matter density fluctuations in a relativistic context can be found from a simple method. For the power spectrum at linear level, we compare leading-order wide-angle contributions to multipoles of the galaxy power spectrum with those from nonintegrated and integrated relativistic corrections and estimate their possible contamination on local fNL measurements to be of order a few. We also compute wide-angle corrections in the presence of nonlinear terms at one-loop order. For the bispectrum, we show that wide-angle effects alone, even with fully symmetric choices of LOS, give rise to imaginary, odd-parity multipoles of the galaxy bispectrum (dipole, octupole, etc.), which are, in many cases, larger than previously known ones of relativistic origin. We calculate these contributions and provide an estimator for measuring the leading-order bispectrum dipole from data, using a symmetric LOS definition. Finally, we calculate the leading-order corrections to multipoles of real plane-parallel bispectrum multipoles and estimate the apparent local fNL induced to be of order unity.

Automated summary

This work investigates the distortions of galaxy power spectrum and bispectrum signals caused by peculiar velocities and relativistic effects. It also studies the correlation functions of tracers in Fourier space using the plane-parallel approximation. The authors propose a simple perturbative procedure to evaluate beyond plane-parallel corrections and calculate the contributions of wide-angle effects on the power spectrum and bispectrum. They find that these corrections can contaminate local fNL measurements on the order of a few and that wide-angle effects can generate larger multipoles of the galaxy bispectrum. The study also estimates the apparent local fNL induced by leading-order corrections to be of order unity.