Optimizing marked power spectra for cosmology

ABSTRACT Marked power spectra provide a computationally efficient way to extract non-Gaussian information from the matter density field using the usual analysis tools developed for the power spectrum without the need for explicit calculation of higher-order correlators. In this work, we explore the optimal form of the mark function used for re-weighting the density field, to maximally constrain cosmology. We show that adding to the mark function or multiplying it by a constant leads to no additional information gain, which significantly reduces our search space for optimal marks. We quantify the information gain of this optimal function and compare it against mark functions previously proposed in the literature. We find that we can gain around $\sim 2$ times smaller errors in $\sigma _8$ and $\sim 4$ times smaller errors in $\Omega _\mathrm{m}$ compared to using the traditional power spectrum alone, an improvement of $\sim 60~{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ compared to other proposed marks when applied to the same data set.