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

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... 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 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 times weaker, but still present.