Cosmological parameter constraints from large scale structure

Abstract

The distribution of galaxies in the low-redshift Universe provides information on the initial conditions, energy content, and evolution of the Universe from its almost Gaussian primordial state to the highly non-linear cosmic web that we observe today. In this talk, I will introduce a class of statistics that are capable of extracting both Gaussian and non-Gaussian information from the matter distribution. The so-called Minkowski Functionals and their rank-2 tensorial generalisation are a class of topological descriptors of a field which can be used to measure cosmological parameters, test the degree of non-Gaussianity as a function of scale and also provides a mechanism to test statistical isotropy. I will describe these statistics, explain how we extract them from galaxy catalogs and elucidate what they can tell us about the properties of the Universe.