Beyond 3×2-point cosmology: the integrated shear and galaxy 3-point correlation functions

Abstract

Abstract We present the integrated 3-point correlation functions (3PCF) involving both the cosmic shear and the galaxy density fields. These are a set of higher-order statistics that describe the modulation of local 2-point correlation functions (2PCF) by large-scale features in the fields, and which are easy to measure from galaxy imaging surveys. Based on previous works on the shear-only integrated 3PCF, we develop the theoretical framework for modelling 5 new statistics involving the galaxy field and its cross-correlations with cosmic shear. Using realistic galaxy and cosmic shear mocks from simulations, we determine the regime of validity of our models based on leading-order standard perturbation theory with an MCMC analysis that recovers unbiased constraints of the amplitude of fluctuations parameter A s and the linear and quadratic galaxy bias parameters b 1 and b 2 . Using Fisher matrix forecasts for a DES-Y3-like survey, relative to baseline analyses with conventional 3×2PCFs, we find that the addition of the shear-only integrated 3PCF can improve cosmological parameter constraints by 20–40%. The subsequent addition of the new statistics introduced in this paper can lead to further improvements of 10–20%, even when utilizing only conservatively large scales where the tree-level models are valid. Our results motivate future work on the galaxy and shear integrated 3PCFs, which offer a practical way to extend standard analyses based on 3×2PCFs to systematically probe the non-Gaussian information content of cosmic density fields.