Sigma-Eight at the Percent Level: The EFT Likelihood in Real Space
  The effective field theory likelihood for the density field of biased tracers
allows for cosmology inference from the clustering of galaxies that
consistently uses all available information at a given order in perturbation
theory. This paper presents results and implementation details on the
real-space (as opposed to Fourier-space) formulation of the likelihood, which
allows for the incorporation of survey window functions. The implementation
further uses a Lagrangian forward model for biased tracers which automatically
accounts for all relevant contributions up to any desired order. Unbiased
inference of $\sigma_8$ is demonstrated at the 2% level for cutoff values
$\Lambda \leq 0.14h\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ for halo samples over a range of masses
and redshifts. The inferred value shows the expected convergence to the ground
truth in the low-cutoff limit. Apart from the possibility of including
observational effects, this represents further substantial improvement over
previous results based on the EFT likelihood.
