Generation of Arbitrarily Non-Gaussian Fields with a Set Correlation Structure

Abstract

Non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background and the large-scale structure of galaxies provides an increasingly powerful probe of the universe. I implement an algorithm to generate realisations of fields that possess an arbitrary probability distribution function and an arbitrary power spectrum and demonstrate the code with a number of examples, including the uniform distribution, the Laplace distribution, the $\chi$ and $\chi^2$ distributions, Rayleigh and Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions. The code is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nongaussian.