Impact of lensing magnification on the power spectrum turnover
The turnover scale $k_0$ of the matter power spectrum -- and consequently of the standard galaxy power spectrum monopole -- encodes a fundamental signature of matter-radiation equality and constitutes an important standard ruler independent of baryon acoustic oscillations. In principle, we can detect the turnover at multiple redshifts and amplify the signal by stacking redshift bins. However, in spectroscopic surveys reaching high redshifts, such as the Euclid H$\alpha$ survey and the proposed MegaMapper Lyman-break galaxy survey, the monopole of the observed galaxy power spectrum receives a scale-dependent correction from lensing magnification. This can modify the signal shape and shift the turnover scale, undermining its use as a standard ruler. Using mock surveys similar to Euclid and MegaMapper, we forecast this shift and the consequent bias in the turnover scale that is recovered from the mock data. The shift in the turnover scale grows with redshift, leading to a maximum bias of $\sim 0.4\sigma$ (Euclid-like) and $\sim 3.6\sigma$ (MegaMapper-like). To avoid a bias $>1\sigma$, the maximum redshift for a MegaMapper-like survey is $z\approx 2.9$. Data in the remaining range $2.9\lesssim z\le 5$ does not directly provide a reliable recovery of the intrinsic turnover. In fact, we find that the turnover vanishes in a MegaMapper-like survey for $z\gtrsim 3.7$. Our results show that the lensing correction to the monopole should be included and carefully modelled when surveys are used to measure the cosmological turnover at high redshifts.