Fast and easy super-sample covariance of large-scale structure observables^⋆

¹ Département de Physique Théorique and Center for Astroparticle Physics, Université de Genève, 24 quai Ernest Ansermet, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland
e-mail: fabien.lacasa@unige.ch
² Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, CNRS (UMR8617) and Université Paris-Sud 11, Bâtiment 121, 91405 Orsay, France

Received: 28 September 2018
Accepted: 15 February 2019

Abstract

We present a numerically cheap approximation to super-sample covariance (SSC) of large-scale structure cosmological probes, first in the case of angular power spectra. No new elements are needed besides those used to predict the considered probes, thus relieving analysis pipelines from having to develop a full SSC modeling, and reducing the computational load. The approximation is asymptotically exact for fine redshift bins Δz → 0. We furthermore show how it can be implemented at the level of a Gaussian likelihood or a Fisher matrix forecast as a fast correction to the Gaussian case without needing to build large covariance matrices. Numerical application to a Euclid-like survey show that, compared to a full SSC computation, the approximation nicely recovers the signal-to-noise ratio and the Fisher forecasts on cosmological parameters of the wCDM cosmological model. Moreover, it allows for a fast prediction of which parameters are going to be the most affected by SSC and at what level. In the case of photometric galaxy clustering with Euclid-like specifications, we find that σ₈, n_s, and the dark energy equation of state w are particularly heavily affected. We finally show how to generalize the approximation for probes other than angular spectra (correlation functions, number counts, and bispectra) and at the likelihood level, allowing for the latter to be non-Gaussian if necessary. We release publicly a Python module allowing the implementation of the SSC approximation and a notebook reproducing the plots of the article.