No Arabic abstract
We use a suite of N-body simulations that incorporate massive neutrinos as an extra-set of particles to investigate their effect on the halo mass function. We show that for cosmologies with massive neutrinos the mass function of dark matter haloes selected using the spherical overdensity (SO) criterion is well reproduced by the fitting formula of Tinker et al. (2008) once the cold dark matter power spectrum is considered instead of the total matter power, as it is usually done. The differences between the two implementations, i.e. using $P_{rm cdm}(k)$ instead of $P_{rm m}(k)$, are more pronounced for large values of the neutrino masses and in the high end of the halo mass function: in particular, the number of massive haloes is higher when $P_{rm cdm}(k)$ is considered rather than $P_{rm m}(k)$. As a quantitative application of our findings we consider a Planck-like SZ-clusters survey and show that the differences in predicted number counts can be as large as $30%$ for $sum m_ u = 0.4$ eV. Finally, we use the Planck-SZ clusters sample, with an approximate likelihood calculation, to derive Planck-like constraints on cosmological parameters. We find that, in a massive neutrino cosmology, our correction to the halo mass function produces a shift in the $sigma_8(Omega_{rm m}/0.27)^gamma$ relation which can be quantified as $Delta gamma sim 0.05$ and $Delta gamma sim 0.14$ assuming one ($N_ u=1$) or three ($N_ u=3$) degenerate massive neutrino, respectively. The shift results in a lower mean value of $sigma_8$ with $Delta sigma_8 = 0.01$ for $N_ u=1$ and $Delta sigma_8 = 0.02$ for $N_ u=3$, respectively. Such difference, in a cosmology with massive neutrinos, would increase the tension between cluster abundance and Planck CMB measurements.
We investigate potential systematic effects in constraining the amplitude of primordial fluctuations sigma_8 arising from the choice of halo mass function in the likelihood analysis of current and upcoming galaxy cluster surveys. We study the widely used N-body simulation fit of Tinker et al. (T08) and, as an alternative, the recently proposed analytical model of Excursion Set Peaks (ESP). We first assess the relative bias between these prescriptions when constraining sigma_8 by sampling the ESP mass function to generate mock catalogs and using the T08 fit to analyse them, for various choices of survey selection threshold, mass definition and statistical priors. To assess the level of absolute bias in each prescription, we then repeat the analysis on dark matter halo catalogs in N-body simulations designed to mimic the mass distribution in the current data release of Planck SZ clusters. This N-body analysis shows that using the T08 fit without accounting for the scatter introduced when converting between mass definitions (alternatively, the scatter induced by errors on the parameters of the fit) can systematically over-estimate the value of sigma_8 by as much as 2sigma for current data, while analyses that account for this scatter should be close to unbiased in sigma_8. With an increased number of objects as expected in upcoming data releases, regardless of accounting for scatter, the T08 fit could over-estimate the value of sigma_8 by ~1.5sigma. The ESP mass function leads to systematically more biased but comparable results. A strength of the ESP model is its natural prediction of a weak non-universality in the mass function which closely tracks the one measured in simulations and described by the T08 fit. We suggest that it might now be prudent to build new unbiased ESP-based fitting functions for use with the larger datasets of the near future.
We use a large suite of N-body simulations to study departures from universality in halo abundances and clustering in cosmologies with non-vanishing neutrino masses. To this end, we study how the halo mass function and halo bias factors depend on the scaling variable $sigma^2(M,z)$, the variance of the initial matter fluctuation field, rather than on halo mass $M$ and redshift $z$ themselves. We show that using the variance of the cold dark matter rather than the total mass field, i.e., $sigma^2_{cdm}(M,z)$ rather than $sigma^2_{m}(M,z)$, yields more universal results. Analysis of halo bias yields similar conclusions: When large-scale halo bias is defined with respect to the cold dark matter power spectrum, the result is both more universal, and less scale- or $k$-dependent. These results are used extensively in Papers I and III of this series.
We provide a quantitative analysis of the halo model in the context of massive neutrino cosmologies. We discuss all the ingredients necessary to model the non-linear matter and cold dark matter power spectra and compare with the results of N-body simulations that incorporate massive neutrinos. Our neutrino halo model is able to capture the non-linear behavior of matter clustering with a $sim 20%$ accuracy up to very non-linear scales of $k=10~h/$Mpc (which would be affected by baryon physics). The largest discrepancies arise in the range $k=0.5-1~h/$Mpc where the 1-halo and 2-halo terms are comparable and are present also in a massless neutrino cosmology. However, at scales $k<0.2~h/$Mpc our neutrino halo model agrees with the results of N-body simulations at the level of 8% for total neutrino masses of $<0.3$ eV. We also model the neutrino non-linear density field as a sum of a linear and clustered component and predict the neutrino power spectrum and the cold dark matter-neutrino cross-power spectrum up to $k=1~h/$Mpc with $sim$ 30% accuracy. For masses below 0.15 eV the neutrino halo model captures the neutrino induced suppression, casted in terms of matter power ratios between massive and massless scenarios, with a 2% agreement with the results of N-body/neutrino simulations. Finally, we provide a simple application of the halo model: the computation of the clustering of galaxies, in massless and massive neutrinos cosmologies, using a simple Halo Occupation Distribution scheme and our halo model extension.
The abundance of collapsed objects in the universe, or halo mass function, is an important theoretical tool in studying the effects of primordially generated non-Gaussianities on the large scale structure. The non-Gaussian mass function has been calculated by several authors in different ways, typically by exploiting the smallness of certain parameters which naturally appear in the calculation, to set up a perturbative expansion. We improve upon the existing results for the mass function by combining path integral methods and saddle point techniques (which have been separately applied in previous approaches). Additionally, we carefully account for the various scale dependent combinations of small parameters which appear. Some of these combinations in fact become of order unity for large mass scales and at high redshifts, and must therefore be treated non-perturbatively. Our approach allows us to do this, and to also account for multi-scale density correlations which appear in the calculation. We thus derive an accurate expression for the mass function which is based on approximations that are valid over a larger range of mass scales and redshifts than those of other authors. By tracking the terms ignored in the analysis, we estimate theoretical errors for our result and also for the results of others. We also discuss the complications introduced by the choice of smoothing filter function, which we take to be a top-hat in real space, and which leads to the dominant errors in our expression. Finally, we present a detailed comparison between the various expressions for the mass functions, exploring the accuracy and range of validity of each.
We present a halo mass function accurate over the full relevant Hu-Sawicki $f(R)$ parameter space based on spherical collapse calculations and calibrated to a suite of modified gravity $N$-body simulations that include massive neutrinos. We investigate the ability of current and forthcoming galaxy cluster observations to detect deviations from general relativity while constraining the total neutrino mass and including systematic uncertainties. Our results indicate that the degeneracy between massive neutrino and modify gravity effects is a limiting factor for the current searches for new gravitational physics with clusters of galaxies, but future surveys will be able to break the degeneracy.