Cosmology and neutrino mass with the minimum spanning tree. Issue 3 (27th April 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Naidoo, Krishna; Massara, Elena; Lahav, Ofer
• Is Part Of: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Volume 513:Issue 3(2022)
• Page Start: 3596
• Page End: 3609
• Publication Date: 2022-04-27
• Subjects: neutrinos -- cosmological parameters -- large-scale structure of Universe; Astronomy -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 520.5
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac1138
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0035-8711

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The information content of the minimum spanning tree (MST), used to capture higher order statistics and information from the cosmic web, is compared to that of the power spectrum for a νΛCDM model. The measurements are made in redshift space using haloes from the Quijote simulation of mass $\ge 3.2\times 10^{13}\, h^{-1}\, {\rm M}_{\odot }$ in a box of length $L_{\rm box}=1\, h^{-1}\, {\rm Gpc}$ . The power spectrum multipoles (monopole and quadrupole) are computed for Fourier modes in the range $0.006\, h{\rm Mpc}^{-1} \lt k \lt 0.5\, h{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ . For comparison the MST is measured with a minimum length-scale of $l_{\min }\simeq 13\, h^{-1}\, {\rm Mpc}$ . Combining the MST and power spectrum allows for many of the individual degeneracies to be broken; on its own the MST provides tighter constraints on the sum of neutrino masses M ν and cosmological parameters h, n s, and Ωb but the power spectrum alone provides tighter constraints on Ωm and σ8 . Combined we find constraints that are a factor of two (or greater) on all parameters with respect to the power spectrum (for M ν there is a factor of four improvement). These improvements appear to be driven by the MST's sensitivity to small scale clustering, where the effect of neutrino free-streaming becomes relevant, and high-order statistical information in the cosmic web. The MST is shown to be a powerful tool for cosmology and neutrino mass studies, and therefore could play a pivotal role in ongoing and future galaxy redshift surveys (such as DES, DESI, Euclid, and Rubin-LSST).