An optimal method for the power spectrum measurement

Abstract

An aliasing effect brought up by mass assignment onto Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) grids may bias measurement of the power spectrum of large scale structures. In this paper, based on the Beylkin's unequally spaced FFT technique, we propose a new precise method to extract the true power spectrum of a large discrete data set. We compare the traditional mass assignment schemes with the new method using the Daub6 and the 3rd-order B-spline scaling functions. Our measurement of Poisson samples and samples of N-body simulations shows that the B-spline scaling function is an optimal choice for mass assignment in the sense that (1) it has a compact support in real space and thus yields an efficient algorithm (2) without any extra corrections. The Fourier space behavior of the 3rd-order B-spline scaling function enables it to be able to accurately recover the true power spectrum with errors less than 5% up to k ≤ kN. It is expected that such a method can be applied to higher order statistics in Fourier space and will enable us to have a precision capture of the non-Gaussian features in the large scale structure of the universe. © 2009 National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences and IOP Publishing Ltd..