Blinding scheme for the scale-dependence bias signature of local primordial non-Gaussianity for DESI 2024

Understand

The next generation of spectroscopic surveys is expected to achieve an unprecedented level of accuracy in the measurement of cosmological parameters.

• To avoid confirmation bias and thereby improve the reliability of these results, blinding procedures become a standard practice in the cosmological analyses of such surveys.
• Blinding is especially crucial when the impact of observational systematics is important relative to the cosmological signal, and a detection of that signal would have significant implications.
• This is the case for local primordial non-gaussianity, as probed by the scale-dependent bias of the galaxy power spectrum at large scales that are heavily sensitive to the dependence of the target selection on the imaging quality, known as imaging systematics.