Fisher for complements: Extracting cosmology and neutrino mass from the counts-in-cells PDF

Understand

We comprehensively analyse the cosmology dependence of counts-in-cell statistics.

• We focus on the shape of the one-point probability distribution function (PDF) of the matter density field at mildly nonlinear scales.
• Based on large-deviation statistics, we parametrise the cosmology dependence of the matter PDF in terms of the linear power spectrum, the growth factor, the spherical collapse dynamics, and the nonlinear variance.
• We extend our formalism to include massive neutrinos, finding that the total matter PDF is highly sensitive to the total neutrino mass $M_\nu$ and can disentangle it from the clustering amplitude $\sigma_8$.