On the road to percent accuracy: The Reaction Way

Abstract

The unprecedented statistical power of upcoming cosmic shear surveys will require exquisite knowledge of the matter power spectrum over a wide range of scales. Analytical methods can achieve this only up to quasi-linear scales. For smaller non-linear scales we must resort to simulations, which, however, remain computationally expensive. Over the past decade emulators have propelled our ability to hit the target accuracy with impressive computing efficiency. Yet, realistically these techniques will be applicable only to a restricted sub-set of extensions to the “vanilla” ΛCDM cosmology. I will present a promising alternative to alleviate these shortcomings that draws strength from the combination of halo model, perturbation theory and emulators–the reaction framework. I will show how a power spectrum evolved in the standard cosmology can be readily adjusted to account for physics beyond ΛCDM, and discuss the accuracy of the reaction for well-known modifications to gravity, dark energy parametrizations and massive neutrino cosmologies.