Joint Cosmic Density Reconstruction from Photometric and Spectroscopic Samples

Abstract: We reconstruct the dark matter density field from spatially overlapping spectroscopic and photometric redshift catalogs through a forward modelling approach. Instead of directly inferring the underlying density field, we find the best fitting initial Gaussian fluctuations that will evolve into the observed cosmic volume. To account for the substantial uncertainty of photometric redshifts we employ a differentiable continuous Poisson process. In the context of the upcoming Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS), we find improvements in cosmic structure classification equivalent to 50-100\% more spectroscopic targets by combining relatively sparse spectroscopic with dense photometric samples.