Future constraints on angle-dependent non-Gaussianity from large radio surveys

Abstract

Abstract We investigate how well future large-scale radio surveys could measure different shapes of primordial non-Gaussianity; in particular we focus on angle-dependent non-Gaussianity arising from primordial anisotropic sources, whose bispectrum has an angle dependence between the three wavevectors that is characterized by Legendre polynomials P L and expansion coefficients c L . We provide forecasts for measurements of galaxy power spectrum, finding that Large-Scale Structure (LSS) data could allow measurements of primordial non-Gaussianity that would be competitive with, or improve upon, current constraints set by CMB experiments, for all the shapes considered. We argue that the best constraints will come from the possibility to assign redshift information to radio galaxy surveys, and investigate a few possible scenarios for the EMU and SKA surveys. A realistic (futuristic) modeling could provide constraints of f NL loc ≈ 1 ( 0 . 5 ) for the local shape, f NL of O ( 10 ) ( O ( 1 ) ) for the orthogonal, equilateral and folded shapes, and c L = 1 ≈ 80 ( 2 ) , c L = 2 ≈ 400 ( 10 ) for angle-dependent non-Gaussianity showing that only futuristic galaxy surveys will be able to set strong constraints on these models. Nevertheless, the more futuristic forecasts show the potential of LSS analyses to considerably improve current constraints on non-Gaussianity, and so on models of the primordial Universe. Finally, we find the minimum requirements that would be needed to reach σ ( c L = 1 ) = 10 , which can be considered as a typical (lower) value predicted by some (inflationary) models.