Astronomy & Space

Dark Matter Halos Reveal Hidden Patterns Through Advanced Clustering Analysis

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Dark matterCorrelation function

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This study quantifies how much cosmological information can be extracted from increasingly complex statistical measurements of dark matter halo clustering. Using approximately 38,000 GPU-accelerated simulations, researchers found that adding the three-point correlation function (3PCF) to standard two-point measurements substantially improves constraints on cosmological parameters, particularly neutrino mass and matter clustering amplitude, by factors of 1.6 to 6.3. The four-point correlation function provides additional but more modest improvements of 1.2 to 1.5 times, with gains primarily from small-scale configurations.


These findings demonstrate that higher-order clustering statistics can significantly enhance our ability to constrain fundamental cosmological parameters, especially neutrino mass, from upcoming large-scale galaxy surveys. The configuration-space approach offers an alternative analysis method that complements traditional Fourier-space techniques for extracting maximum information from observational data.


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⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed

Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.

Abstract: We quantify the information content of the configuration-space two-, three-, and connected four-point correlation functions of Quijote dark-matter haloes at $z=0$ and fixed number density. We build Fisher forecasts for ${Omega_m, Omega_b, h, n_s, sigma_8, M_nu}$ in real and redshift space from ${sim}38{,}000$ GPU-accelerated $N$-point measurements. Treating the statistics as a ladder, $mathrm{2PCF} rightarrow +mathrm{3PCF} rightarrow +zeta^{(4)}_{mathrm{conn}}$, we report the information gained at each rung. The 3PCF supplies most of the accessible higher-order information: it tightens every parameter, most strongly $sigma_8$ and $M_nu$, whose degeneracy it partially breaks, by factors of $1.6$–$6.3$ over the redshift-space ${xi_0,xi_2}$ baseline with per-parameter gains consistent with those of the Fourier-space halo bispectrum on the same simulations. The 3PCF gains persist under conservative, modelling-motivated scale cuts: restricted to the tree-level-validated regime with minimum triangle side $ge40,h^{-1}{rm Mpc}$, it still improves $M_nu$ by $3.9times$. The connected 4PCF adds a further $sim1.2$–$1.5times$, an increment insensitive to whether the quadrupole is included in the baseline but traceable to small-scale configurations with sides $lesssim30,h^{-1}{rm Mpc}$. This rung-to-rung increment is stable against derivative-sample noise and compression regularization, whereas the absolute constraints remain limited by the finite simulation ensembles and are reported as preliminary. The configuration-space ladder thus offers an independent and complementary route to the higher-order information probed by the Fourier-space poly-spectra.

Source: Climbing the $N$-point Ladder Part I: Information in the Higher-Order Configuration-Space Clustering of Dark Matter Halos