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We present a new parallel implementation of the PINpointing Orbit Crossing-Collapsed HIerarchical Objects (PINOCCHIO) algorithm, a quick tool, based on Lagrangian Perturbation Theory, for the hierarchical build-up of Dark Matter halos in cosmological volumes. To assess its ability to predict halo correlations on large scales, we compare its results with those of an N-body simulation of a 3 Gpc/h box sampled with 2048^3 particles taken from the MICE suite, matching the same seeds for the initial conditions. Thanks to the FFTW libraries and to the relatively simple design, the code shows very good scaling properties. The CPU time required by PINOCCHIO is a tiny fraction (~1/2000) of that required by the MICE simulation. Varying some of PINOCCHIO numerical parameters allows one to produce a universal mass function that lies in the range allowed by published fits, although it underestimates the MICE mass function of FoF halos in the high mass tail. We compare the matter-halo and the halo-halo power spectra with those of the MICE simulation and find that these 2-point statistics are well recovered on large scales. In particular, when catalogs are matched in number density, agreement within ten per cent is achieved for the halo power spectrum. At scales k>0.1 h/Mpc, the inaccuracy of the Zeldovich approximation in locating halo positions causes an underestimate of the power spectrum that can be modeled as a Gaussian factor with a damping scale of d=3 Mpc/h at z=0, decreasing at higher redshift. Finally, a remarkable match is obtained for the reduced halo bispectrum, showing a good description of nonlinear halo bias. Our results demonstrate the potential of PINOCCHIO as an accurate and flexible tool for generating large ensembles of mock galaxy surveys, with interesting applications for the analysis of large galaxy redshift surveys.
We present an accurate and fast framework for generating mock catalogues including low-mass halos, based on an implementation of the COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (COLA) technique. Multiple realisations of mock catalogues are crucial for analyses of large-scale structure, but conventional N-body simulations are too computationally expensive for the production of thousands of realisations. We show that COLA simulations can produce accurate mock catalogues with a moderate computation resource for low- to intermediate- mass galaxies in $10^{12} M_odot$ haloes, both in real and redshift space. COLA simulations have accurate peculiar velocities, without systematic errors in the velocity power spectra for k < 0.15 h/Mpc, and with only 3-per-cent error for k < 0.2 h/Mpc. We use COLA with 10 time steps and a Halo Occupation Distribution to produce 600 mock galaxy catalogues of the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey. Our parallelized code for efficient generation of accurate halo catalogues is publicly available at github.com/junkoda/cola_halo.
We investigate the correlation between nine different dark matter halo properties using a rank correlation analysis and a Principal Component Analysis for a sample of haloes spanning five orders of magnitude in mass. We consider mass and dimensionless measures of concentration, age, relaxedness, sphericity, triaxiality, substructure, spin, and environment, where the latter is defined in a way that makes it insensitive to mass. We find that concentration is the most fundamental property. Except for environment, all parameters are strongly correlated with concentration. Concentration, age, substructure, mass, sphericity and relaxedness can be considered a single family of parameters, albeit with substantial scatter. In contrast, spin, environment, and triaxiality are more independent, although spin does correlate strongly with substructure and both spin and triaxiality correlate substantially with concentration. Although mass sets the scale of a halo, all other properties are more sensitive to concentration.
We perform an ensemble of $N$-body simulations with $2048^3$ particles for 101 flat $w$CDM cosmological models sampled based on a maximin-distance Sliced Latin Hypercube Design. By using the halo catalogs extracted at multiple redshifts in the range of $z=[0,1.48]$, we develop Dark Emulator, which enables fast and accurate computations of the halo mass function, halo-matter cross-correlation, and halo auto-correlation as a function of halo masses, redshift, separations and cosmological models, based on the Principal Component Analysis and the Gaussian Process Regression for the large-dimensional input and output data vector. We assess the performance of the emulator using a validation set of $N$-body simulations that are not used in training the emulator. We show that, for typical halos hosting CMASS galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the emulator predicts the halo-matter cross correlation, relevant for galaxy-galaxy weak lensing, with an accuracy better than $2%$ and the halo auto-correlation, relevant for galaxy clustering correlation, with an accuracy better than $4%$. We give several demonstrations of the emulator. It can be used to study properties of halo mass density profiles such as the mass-concentration relation and splashback radius for different cosmologies. The emulator outputs can be combined with an analytical prescription of halo-galaxy connection such as the halo occupation distribution at the equation level, instead of using the mock catalogs, to make accurate predictions of galaxy clustering statistics such as the galaxy-galaxy weak lensing and the projected correlation function for any model within the $w$CDM cosmologies, in a few CPU seconds.
Cross-correlating gamma-ray maps with locations of galaxies in the low-redshift Universe vastly increases sensitivity to signatures of annihilation of dark matter particles. Low-redshift galaxies are ideal targets, as the largest contribution to anisotropy in the gamma-ray sky from annihilation comes from $zlesssim 0.1$, where we expect minimal contributions from astrophysical sources such as blazars. Cross-correlating the five-year data of Fermi-LAT with the redshift catalog of the 2MASS survey can detect gamma rays from annihilation if dark matter has the canonical annihilation cross section and its mass is smaller than $sim$100 GeV.
We present a study of unprecedented statistical power regarding the halo-to-halo variance of dark matter substructure. Using a combination of N-body simulations and a semi-analytical model, we investigate the variance in subhalo mass fractions and subhalo occupation numbers, with an emphasis on how these statistics scale with halo formation time. We demonstrate that the subhalo mass fraction, f_sub, is mainly a function of halo formation time, with earlier forming haloes having less substructure. At fixed formation redshift, the average f_sub is virtually independent of halo mass, and the mass dependence of f_sub is therefore mainly a manifestation of more massive haloes assembling later. We compare observational constraints on f_sub from gravitational lensing to our model predictions and simulation results. Although the inferred f_sub are substantially higher than the median LCDM predictions, they fall within the 95th percentile due to halo-to-halo variance. We show that while the halo occupation distribution of subhaloes, P(N|M), is super-Poissonian for large <N>, a well established result, it becomes sub-Poissonian for <N> < 2. Ignoring the non-Poissonity results in systematic errors of the clustering of galaxies of a few percent, and with a complicated scale- and luminosity-dependence. Earlier-formed haloes have P(N|M) closer to a Poisson distribution, suggesting that the dynamical evolution of subhaloes drives the statistics towards Poissonian. Contrary to a recent claim, the non-Poissonity of subhalo occupation statistics does not vanish by selecting haloes with fixed mass and fixed formation redshift. Finally, we use subhalo occupation statistics to put loose constraints on the mass and formation redshift of the Milky Way halo. Using observational constraints on the V_max of the most massive satellites, we infer that 0.25<M_vir/10^12M_sun/h<1.4 and 0.1<z_f<1.4 at 90% confidence.