No Arabic abstract
Following up on previous studies, we here complete a full analysis of the void size distributions of the Cosmic Void Catalog (CVC) based on three different simulation and mock catalogs; dark matter, haloes and galaxies. Based on this analysis, we attempt to answer two questions: Is a 3-parameter log-normal distribution a good candidate to satisfy the void size distributions obtained from different types of environments? Is there a direct relation between the shape parameters of the void size distribution and the environmental effects? In an attempt to answer these questions, we here find that all void size distributions of these data samples satisfy the 3-parameter log-normal distribution whether the environment is dominated by dark matter, haloes or galaxies. In addition, the shape parameters of the 3-parameter log-normal void size distribution seem highly affected by environment, particularly existing substructures. Therefore, we show two quantitative relations given by linear equations between the skewness and the maximum tree depth, and variance of the void size distribution and the maximum tree depth directly from the simulated data. In addition to this, we find that the percentage of the voids with nonzero central density in the data sets has a critical importance. If the number of voids with nonzero central densities reaches greater and or equal to 3.84 percentage in a simulation/mock sample, then a second population is observed in the void size distributions. This second population emerges as a second peak in the log-normal void size distribution at larger radius.
In this study, we obtain the size distribution of voids as a 3-parameter redshift independent log-normal void probability function (VPF) directly from the Cosmic Void Catalog (CVC). Although many statistical models of void distributions are based on the counts in randomly placed cells, the log-normal VPF that we here obtain is independent of the shape of the voids due to the parameter-free void finder of the CVC. We use three void populations drawn from the CVC generated by the Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) Mocks which are tuned to three mock SDSS samples to investigate the void distribution statistically and the effects of the environments on the size distribution. As a result, it is shown that void size distributions obtained from the HOD Mock samples are satisfied by the 3-parameter log-normal distribution. In addition, we find that there may be a relation between hierarchical formation, skewness and kurtosis of the log-normal distribution for each catalog. We also show that the shape of the 3-parameter distribution from the samples is strikingly similar to the galaxy log-normal mass distribution obtained from numerical studies. This similarity of void size and galaxy mass distributions may possibly indicate evidence of nonlinear mechanisms affecting both voids and galaxies, such as large scale accretion and tidal effects. Considering in this study all voids are generated by galaxy mocks and show hierarchical structures in different levels, it may be possible that the same nonlinear mechanisms of mass distribution affect the void size distribution.
We present a Bayesian reconstruction algorithm to generate unbiased samples of the underlying dark matter field from halo catalogues. Our new contribution consists of implementing a non-Poisson likelihood including a deterministic non-linear and scale-dependent bias. In particular we present the Hamiltonian equations of motions for the negative binomial (NB) probability distribution function. This permits us to efficiently sample the posterior distribution function of density fields given a sample of galaxies using the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo technique implemented in the Argo code. We have tested our algorithm with the Bolshoi $N$-body simulation at redshift $z = 0$, inferring the underlying dark matter density field from sub-samples of the halo catalogue with biases smaller and larger than one. Our method shows that we can draw closely unbiased samples (compatible within 1-$sigma$) from the posterior distribution up to scales of about $k$~1 h/Mpc in terms of power-spectra and cell-to-cell correlations. We find that a Poisson likelihood yields reconstructions with power spectra deviating more than 10% at $k$=0.2 h/Mpc. Our reconstruction algorithm is especially suited for emission line galaxy data for which a complex non-linear stochastic biasing treatment beyond Poissonity becomes indispensable.
Voids form a prominent aspect of the Megaparsec distribution of galaxies and matter. Not only do they represent a key constituent of the Cosmic Web, they also are one of the cleanest probes and measures of global cosmological parameters. The shape and evolution of voids are highly sensitive to the nature of dark energy, while their substructure and galaxy population provides a direct key to the nature of dark matter. Also, the pristine environment of void interiors is an important testing ground for our understanding of environmental influences on galaxy formation and evolution. In this paper, we review the key aspects of the structure and dynamics of voids, with a particular focus on the hierarchical evolution of the void population. We demonstrate how the rich structural pattern of the Cosmic Web is related to the complex evolution and buildup of voids.
Cosmic voids are large underdense regions that, together with galaxy clusters, filaments and walls, build up the large-scale structure of the Universe. The void size function provides a powerful probe to test the cosmological framework. However, to fully exploit this statistics, the void sample has to be properly cleaned from spurious objects. Furthermore, the bias of the mass tracers used to detect these regions has to be taken into account in the size function model. In our work we test a cleaning algorithm and a new void size function model on a set of simulated dark matter halo catalogues, with different mass and redshift selections, to investigate the statistics of voids identified in a biased mass density field. We then investigate how the density field tracers bias affects the detected size of voids. The main result of this analysis is a new model of the size function, parameterised in terms of the linear effective bias of the tracers used, which is straightforwardly inferred from the large-scale two-point correlation function. This represents a crucial step to exploit the method on real data catalogues. The proposed size function model has been accurately calibrated on mock catalogues, and used to validate the possibility to provide forecasts on the cosmological constraints, namely on the matter density contrast, $Omega_{rm M}$, and on the normalisation of the linear matter power spectrum, $sigma_8$, at different redshifts.
We study the evolution of the cross-correlation between voids and the mass density field - i.e. of void profiles. We show that approaches based on the spherical model alone miss an important contribution to the evolution on large scales of most interest to cosmology: they fail to capture the well-known fact that the large-scale bias factor of conserved tracers evolves. We also show that the operations of evolution and averaging do not commute, but this difference is only significant within about two effective radii. We show how to include a term which accounts for the evolution of bias, which is directly related to the fact that voids move. The void motions are approximately independent of void size, so they are more significant for smaller voids that are typically more numerous. This term also contributes to void-matter pairwise velocities: including it is necessary for modeling the typical outflow speeds around voids. It is, therefore, important for void redshift space distortions. Finally, we show that the excursion set peaks/troughs approach provides a useful, but not perfect framework for describing void profiles and their evolution.