Log-transforming the matter power spectrum

We investigate whether non-linear effects on the large-scale power spectrum of dark matter, namely the increase in small-scale power and the smearing of baryon acoustic oscillations, can be decreased by a log-transformation or emulated by an exponential transformation of the linear spectrum. To that end we present a formalism to convert the power spectrum of a log-normal field to the power spectrum of the logarithmic Gaussian field and vice versa. All ingredients of our derivation can already be found in various publications in cosmology and other fields. We follow a more pedagogical approach providing a detailed derivation, application examples, and a discussion of implementation subtleties in one text. We use the formalism to show that the non-linear increase in small-scale power in the matter power spectrum is significantly smaller for the log-transformed spectrum which fits the linear spectrum (with less than 20% error) for redshifts down to 1 and k ≤ 1.0 h Mpc. For lower redshifts the fit to the linear spectrum is not as good, but the reduction of non-linear effects is still significant. Similarly, we show that applying the linear growth factor to the logarithmic density leads to an automatic increase in small-scale power for low redshifts fitting to third-order perturbation spectra and Cosmic Emulator spectra with an error of less than 20%. Smearing of baryon acoustic oscillations is at least three times weaker, but still present.