{\sc SimBIG}: Cosmological Constraints using Simulation-Based Inference of Galaxy Clustering with Marked Power Spectra

Abstract

We present the first $\Lambda$CDM cosmological analysis performed on a galaxy survey using marked power spectra. The marked power spectrum is the two-point function of a marked field, where galaxies are weighted by a function that depends on their local density. The presence of the mark leads these statistics to contain higher-order information of the original galaxy field, making them a good candidate to exploit the non-Gaussian information of a galaxy catalog. In this work we make use of \simbig, a forward modeling framework for galaxy clustering analyses, and perform simulation-based inference using normalizing flows to infer the posterior distribution of the $\Lambda$CDM cosmological parameters. We consider different mark configurations (ways to weight the galaxy field) and deploy them in the \simbig~pipeline to analyze the corresponding marked power spectra measured from a subset of the BOSS galaxy sample. We analyze the redshift-space mark power spectra decomposed in $\ell = 0, 2, 4$ multipoles and include scales up to the non-linear regime. Among the various mark configurations considered, the ones that give the most stringent cosmological constraints produce posterior median and $68\%$ confidence limits on the growth of structure parameters equal to $\Omega_m=0.273^{+0.040}_{-0.030}$ and $\sigma_8=0.777^{+0.077}_{-0.071}$. Compared to a perturbation theory analysis using the power spectrum of the same dataset, the \simbig~marked power spectra constraints on $\sigma_8$ are up to $1.2\times$ tighter, while no improvement is seen for the other cosmological parameters.