Galaxy redshift surveys with sparse sampling

Understand

Survey observations of the three-dimensional locations of galaxies are a powerful approach to measure the distribution of matter in the universe, which can be used to learn about the nature of dark energy, physics of inflation, neutrino masses, etc.

• A competitive survey, however, requires a large volume (e.g., Vsurvey is roughly 10 Gpc3) to be covered, and thus tends to be expensive.
• A "sparse sampling" method offers a more affordable solution to this problem: within a survey footprint covering a given survey volume, Vsurvey, we observe only a fraction of the volume.
• The distribution of observed regions should be chosen such that their separation is smaller than the length scale corresponding to the wavenumber of interest.