We develop a new method to reconstruct the cosmic density field from the distribution of dark matter haloes above a certain mass threshold. Our motivation is that well-defined samples of galaxy groups/clusters, which can be used to represent the dark halo population, can now be selected from large redshift surveys of galaxies, and our ultimate goal is to use such data to reconstruct the cosmic density field in the local universe. Our reconstruction method starts with a sample of dark matter haloes above a given mass threshold. Each volume element in space is assigned to the domain of the nearest halo according to a distance measure that is scaled by the virial radius of the halo. The distribution of the mass in and around dark matter haloes of a given mass is modelled using the cross-correlation function between dark matter haloes and the mass distribution within their domains. We use N-body cosmological simulations to show that the density profiles required in our reconstruction scheme can be determined reliably from large cosmological simulations, and that our method can reconstruct the density field accurately using haloes with masses down to $sim 10^{12}msun$ (above which samples of galaxy groups can be constructed from current large redshift surveys of galaxies). Working in redshift space, we demonstrate that the redshift distortions due to the peculiar velocities of haloes can be corrected in an iterative way. We also describe some applications of our method.
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