On the information content of the matter power spectrum

We discuss an analytical approximation for the matter power spectrum covariance matrix and its inverse on translinear scales, k similar to 0.1h - 0.8 h Mpc(-1) at z = 0. We proceed to give an analytical expression for the Fisher information matrix of the non-linear density-field spectrum, and derive implications for its cosmological information content. We find that the spectrum information is characterized by a pair of upper bounds, 'plateaux', caused by the trispectrum, and a 'knee' in the presence of white noise. The effective number of Fourier modes, normally growing as a power law, is bounded from above by these plateaux, explaining naturally earlier findings from N-body simulations. These plateaux limit best possible measurements of the non-linear power at the per cent level in an h(-3) Gpc(3) volume; the extraction of model parameters from the spectrum is limited explicitly by their degeneracy to the non-linear amplitude. The value of the first, supersurvey (SS) plateau depends on the characteristic survey volume and the large-scale power; the second, intra-survey plateau is set by the small-scale power. While both have simple interpretations within the hierarchical Ansatz, the SS plateau can be predicted and generalized to still smaller scales within Takada and Hu's spectrum response formalism. Finally, the noise knee is naturally set by the density of tracers.