Papers › Impact of survey geometry and super-sample covariance on future photometric galaxy surveys

Impact of survey geometry and super-sample covariance on future photometric galaxy surveys

6 Sep 2021arXiv:2109.02308links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

S. Gouyou Beauchamps, F. Lacasa, I. Tutusaus, M. Aubert, P. Baratta, A. Gorce, Z. Sakr

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Photometric galaxy surveys probe the late-time Universe where the density field is highly non-Gaussian. A consequence is the emergence of the super-sample covariance (SSC), a non-Gaussian covariance term that is sensitive to fluctuations on scales larger than the survey window. In this work, we study the impact of the survey geometry on the SSC and, subsequently, on cosmological parameter inference. We devise a fast SSC approximation that accounts for the survey geometry and compare its performance to the common approximation of rescaling the results by the fraction of the sky covered by the survey, f_(SKY), dubbed 'full-sky approximation'. To gauge the impact of our new SSC recipe, dubbed 'partial-sky', we perform Fisher forecasts on the parameters of the (w₀,wₐ)-CDM model in a 3x2 points analysis, varying the survey area, the geometry of the mask and the galaxy distribution inside our redshift bins. The differences in the marginalised forecast errors, with the full-sky approximation performing poorly for small survey areas but excellently for stage-IV-like areas, are found to be absorbed by the marginalisation on galaxy bias nuisance parameters. For large survey areas, the unmarginalised errors are underestimated by about 10% for all probes considered. This is a hint that, even for stage-IV-like surveys, the partial-sky method introduced in this work will be necessary if tight priors are applied on these nuisance parameters.

PaperPDFCode

Code

fabienlacasa/PySSC officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections