  Non-gaussianity in the initial conditions of the universe is one of the most
powerful mechanisms to discriminate among the competing theories of the early
universe. Measurements using bispectrum of cosmic microwave background
anisotropies are limited by the cosmic variance, i.e. available number of
modes. Recent work has emphasized the possibility to probe non-gaussianity of
local type using the scale dependence of large scale bias from highly biased
tracers of large scale structure. However, this power spectrum method is also
limited by cosmic variance, finite number of structures on the largest scales,
and by the partial degeneracy with other cosmological parameters that can mimic
the same effect. Here we propose an alternative method that solves both of
these problems. It is based on the idea that on large scales halos are biased,
but not stochastic, tracers of dark matter: by correlating a highly biased
tracer of large scale structure against an unbiased tracer one eliminates the
cosmic variance error, which can lead to a high signal to noise even from the
structures comparable to the size of the survey. The square of error
improvement on non-gaussianity parameter f_nl relative to the power spectrum
method scales as Pn/2, where P and n is the power spectrum and the number
density of the biased tracer, respectively. For an ideal survey out to z=2 the
error reduction can be as large as a factor of seven, which should guarantee a
detection of non-gaussianity from an all sky survey of this type. The
improvements could be even larger if high density tracers that are sensitive to
non-gaussianity can be identified and measured over a large volume.

Astrophysics