Daily Papers

We update predictions for observables in the "delicate" D3/anti-D3 inflationary model on the conifold. We use a full CMB likelihood calculation to assess goodness-of-fit, which is necessary because in this model the zeta power spectrum often cannot be modelled as a power-law over observable scales. For the first time we are able to provide accurate forecasts for the amplitude of three-point correlations. In a significant portion of its parameter space the model follows Maldacena's single-field prediction fNL ~ -(5/12)(ns-1) if nt << 1. Therefore |fNL| is usually small when the power spectrum satisfies observational constraints. In a small number of cases the bispectrum is instead dominated by effects from rapid switching between angular minima. The resulting amplitudes are larger, but mostly with unacceptable spectral behaviour. In the most extreme case we obtain |fNLeq| ~ 75 at kt/3 = 0.002/Mpc. It has been suggested that the quasi-single field inflation ("QSFI") mechanism could produce significant 3-point correlations in this model. We do observe rare shifts in amplitude between equilateral and squeezed configurations that could possibly be associated with QSFI effects, but more investigation is needed to establish the full bispectrum shape. There is evidence of "shape" running between equilateral and squeezed configurations that may be inherited from the scale dependence of the spectrum. We explore the dependence of observables on discrete choices such as the truncation point of the potential. Our analysis illustrates the advantages of a standard format for information exchange within the inflationary model-building and testing community.

A major goal of ongoing and future cosmological surveys of the large-scale structure is to measure local type primordial non-Gaussianity in the galaxy power spectrum through the scale-dependent bias. General relativistic effects have been shown to be degenerate with this measurement, therefore requiring a non-Newtonian approach. In this work, we develop a consistent framework to compute integrated effects, including lensing convergence, time delay, and integrated Sachs--Wolfe, along with the local relativistic projection and wide-separation corrections in the multipoles of the power spectrum. We show that, for a Euclid-like Hα-line galaxy survey and a MegaMapper-like Lyman-break galaxy survey, ignoring these effects leads to a bias on the best fit measurement of the amplitude of primordial non-Gaussianity, f_{rm NL}, of around 3,σ and 20 , σ respectively. When we include these corrections, the uncertainty in our knowledge of the luminosity function leads to further uncertainty in our measurement of f_{rm NL}. In this work, we show that this degeneracy can be partly mitigated by using a bright-faint multi-tracer analysis, where the observed galaxy sample is subdivided into two separate populations based on luminosity, which provides a 15--20% improvement on the forecasted constraints of local type f_{rm NL}. In addition, we present a novel calculation of the full multi-tracer covariance with the inclusion of wide-separation corrections~-- all of these results are implemented in the Python code CosmoWAP.

Motivated by searches for weak primordial non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background, we investigate perturbative departures from Gaussian stochastic gravitational wave background statistics using pulsar timing arrays. We consider a quadratic ansatz that shows three-point correlations at first order in the nonlinear coupling and covariance corrections at second order. We first examine the ansatz for gravitational wave helicity amplitudes. However, the timing residual bispectrum that this produces is not manifestly invariant under local polarization basis rotations for tensor and vector modes. Then, we formulate a polarization-frame-invariant phenomenological model for detector-projected amplitudes and evaluate its one-pulsar timing residual third moment with a simplified response. Our numerical benchmarks have shown that this gives a very small Gaussian-rms-normalized skewness.

Recent Pulsar Timing Array datasets provide compelling evidence for a nano-Hertz gravitational-wave background, but robust detection requires characterizing statistical fluctuations of the Hellings-Downs (HD) correlation expected from a finite population of discrete sources. Building on the variance calculation of Allen (2023), we derive the third central moment (skewness) of the HD correlation for a single unpolarized point source and an ensemble of many interfering point sources in the confusion-noise regime. To isolate the intrinsic non-Gaussianity of the background, we extend the pulsar-averaging formalism to third order by introducing a three-point averaged correlation function, which allows us to define the cosmic skewness. We find that the skewness remains non-zero in the large-source-number limit and is controlled by a new geometric three-point function. These results suggest that incorporating higher-order moments could provide additional information on source discreteness beyond standard Gaussian analyses.

Ongoing and upcoming galaxy redshift surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, will observe vast regions of sky and a wide range of redshifts. In order to model the observations and address various systematic uncertainties, N-body simulations are routinely adopted, however, the number of large simulations with sufficiently high mass resolution is usually limited by available computing time. Therefore, achieving a simulation volume with the effective statistical errors significantly smaller than those of the observations becomes prohibitively expensive. In this study, we apply the Convergence Acceleration by Regression and Pooling (CARPool) method to mitigate the sample variance of the DESI-like galaxy clustering in the AbacusSummit simulations, with the assistance of the quasi-N-body simulations FastPM. Based on the halo occupation distribution (HOD) models, we construct different FastPM galaxy catalogs, including the luminous red galaxies (LRGs), emission line galaxies (ELGs), and quasars, with their number densities and two-point clustering statistics well matched to those of AbacusSummit. We also employ the same initial conditions between AbacusSummit and FastPM to achieve high cross-correlation, as it is useful in effectively suppressing the variance. Our method of reducing noise in clustering is equivalent to performing a simulation with volume larger by a factor of 5 and 4 for LRGs and ELGs, respectively. We also mitigate the standard deviation of the LRG bispectrum with the triangular configurations k_2=2k_1=0.2 h/Mpc by a factor of 1.6. With smaller sample variance on galaxy clustering, we are able to constrain the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) scale parameters to higher precision. The CARPool method will be beneficial to better constrain the theoretical systematics of BAO, redshift space distortions (RSD) and primordial non-Gaussianity (NG).

We demonstrate that an axion field can develop perturbations peaked at an intermediate wavenumber through its inflationary dynamics. We compute the resultant spectrum of gravitational waves (GWs) and primordial black holes (PBHs) generated through the curvaton mechanism. The GW spectrum exhibits a triangular shape, with UV and IR slopes determined by the axion's inflationary evolution and treatable as free parameters. In computing the PBH abundance, we properly account for the nonlinear relation between curvature and density perturbations and the primordial non-Gaussianity generated by the curvaton. The PBHs can account for all of dark matter, accompanied by blue-tilted isocurvature perturbations at small scales. The IR slope of the GW spectrum is anti-correlated with the magnitude of the dark matter isocurvature perturbations, offering a multi-messenger test of the model.

Statistics that capture the directional dependence of the baryon distribution in the cosmic web enable unique tests of cosmology and astrophysical feedback. We use constrained oriented stacking of thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) maps to measure the anisotropic distribution of hot gas 2.5-40 Mpc away from galaxy clusters embedded in massive filaments and superclusters. The cluster selection and orientation (at a scale of sim15 Mpc) use Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3 data, while expanded tSZ maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 6 enable a sim3times more significant measurement of the extended gas compared to the technique's proof-of-concept. Decomposing stacks into cosine multipoles of order m, we detect a dipole (m=1) and quadrupole (m=2) at 8-10sigma, as well as evidence for m=4 signal at up to 6sigma, indicating sensitivity to late-time non-Gaussianity. We compare to the Cardinal simulations with spherical gas models pasted onto dark matter halos. The fiducial tSZ data can discriminate between two models that deplete pressure differently in low-mass halos (mimicking astrophysical feedback), preferring higher average pressure in extended structures. However, uncertainty in the amount of cosmic infrared background contamination reduces the constraining power. Additionally, we apply the technique to DES galaxy density and weak lensing to study for the first time their oriented relationships with tSZ. In the tSZ-to-lensing relation, averaged on 7.5 Mpc (transverse) scales, we observe dependence on redshift but not shape or radial distance. Thus, on large scales, the superclustering of gas pressure, galaxies, and total matter is coherent in shape and extent.

Methods that recover individual latent variables of the world, from nonlinear ICA to dictionary learning and causal representation learning, anchor the latents to observations through reconstruction, auxiliary supervision, or distributional asymmetries such as non-Gaussianity. Methods without these anchors, including joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs), identify the latent state only up to a linear transformation, so individual latents remain mixed. We close this gap: individual world latents can be provably recovered with no reconstruction, no decoder, and no labels. The key condition is Structural Diversity: different latents leave distinct dependency footprints on observations, just as no two snowflakes are alike. Building on the linear identifiability that LeJEPA provides, we prove that under Structural Diversity, DSReg (Dependency-Sparsity Regularization) recovers individual world latents up to signed permutation, without reconstruction or a decoder. It applies post hoc to any linearly identified representation, reusing trained checkpoints at no loss over joint training, and establishes the first fully identifiable JEPA that recovers every world latent. Moreover, as a condition on dependency footprints, Structural Diversity is strictly weaker than all structural conditions of prior identifiable latent variable models. Across synthetic regimes, world model probes, learned visual encoders, and external renderers, DSReg preserves dense prediction while improving individual-latent recovery and downstream use with scales.

Stochastic bubble nucleation makes the local completion time of a first-order phase transition a random spatial field. We study its power spectrum and equilateral bispectrum in Minkowski and de Sitter backgrounds, with particular emphasis on the infrared consequences of a finite transition duration. In an eternally extended de Sitter history, rare bubbles nucleated in the remote past generate an ancient-bubble tail that produces a hierarchy of infrared-sensitive spatial moments. For the two-point function, the first finite-k correction becomes tail sensitive at H/β=1/5, while the leading moment becomes singular at H/β=1/3. The corresponding three-point thresholds are H/β=1/8 and 1/6, showing that the bispectrum is more infrared sensitive than the power spectrum. For any finite starting time, however, the ancient-bubble tail is cut off, all spatial moments remain finite, and the strict infrared spectra recover the analytic white-noise limits {cal P}_τpropto k^3 and {cal B}^{rm eq}_τpropto k^6. The eternal-background thresholds instead control the duration dependence of the moment coefficients and the crossover into an intermediate tail-sensitive regime, in agreement with our numerical calculations. We further show that temporal localization of the nucleation history provides a smooth regulator of the ancient-bubble tail and restores the same analytic infrared limits. These results establish a general first-arrival framework for completion-time fluctuations and clarify how de Sitter expansion can generate distinct power-spectrum and bispectrum infrared hierarchies relevant to curvature perturbations and non-Gaussianity.

Non-linear interactions during inflation generate non-Gaussianities in the distribution of primordial curvature. In many theories, the physics is scale-invariant, such that the induced three-point function depends solely on a dimensionless shape function S(x,y)sim k^6B_ζ(kx,ky,k). To confront such models with observations, one typically builds specialized estimators for each shape, then applies them to cosmic microwave background datasets at significant computational expense. In this Letter, we take a different approach, directly reconstructing S(x,y) from observations using an efficient logarithmically-binned estimator in primordial-space (motivated by the modal program). Applying this to temperature and polarization maps from Planck, we obtain high-resolution shape measurements across the full (x,y)-plane, including squeezed limits. Our approach is close-to-optimal, highly interpretable, and preserves the information content on (optimally-analyzed) standard templates within approx 10%; moreover, we can use it to assess the scale-dependence of our constraints, finding that Planck is sensitive to approx 6 e-folds of non-Gaussian evolution with a peak sensitivity around 0.1h,Mpc^{-1}. Since we work directly in shape-space, data and theory can be compared in milliseconds. As an example, we perform a search for massive particle exchange using a suite of over 20,000 theoretical templates computed with exact bootstrap methods (for the first time) across a wide range of masses, spins, and sound-speeds; the spin-two analysis yields a maximum significance of 2.6σ. Our approach can be used to probe a wide range of scale-invariant models in orders-of-magnitude less time than with direct estimators, allowing the inflationary paradigm to be explored in new ways.

3D city generation with NeRF-based methods shows promising generation results but is computationally inefficient. Recently 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged as a highly efficient alternative for object-level 3D generation. However, adapting 3D-GS from finite-scale 3D objects and humans to infinite-scale 3D cities is non-trivial. Unbounded 3D city generation entails significant storage overhead (out-of-memory issues), arising from the need to expand points to billions, often demanding hundreds of Gigabytes of VRAM for a city scene spanning 10km^2. In this paper, we propose GaussianCity, a generative Gaussian Splatting framework dedicated to efficiently synthesizing unbounded 3D cities with a single feed-forward pass. Our key insights are two-fold: 1) Compact 3D Scene Representation: We introduce BEV-Point as a highly compact intermediate representation, ensuring that the growth in VRAM usage for unbounded scenes remains constant, thus enabling unbounded city generation. 2) Spatial-aware Gaussian Attribute Decoder: We present spatial-aware BEV-Point decoder to produce 3D Gaussian attributes, which leverages Point Serializer to integrate the structural and contextual characteristics of BEV points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GaussianCity achieves state-of-the-art results in both drone-view and street-view 3D city generation. Notably, compared to CityDreamer, GaussianCity exhibits superior performance with a speedup of 60 times (10.72 FPS v.s. 0.18 FPS).