No Arabic abstract
Future precision cosmology from large-scale structure experiments including the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid will probe wider and deeper cosmic volumes than those covered by previous surveys. The Cartesian power spectrum analysis of anisotropic galaxy clustering based on the Fourier plane wave basis makes a number of assumptions, including the local plane-parallel approximation, that will no longer be valid on very large scales and may degrade cosmological constraints. We propose an approach that utilises a hybrid basis: on the largest scales, clustering statistics are decomposed into spherical Fourier modes which respect the natural geometry of both survey observations and physical effects along the line of sight, such as redshift-space distortions, the Alcock--Paczynsky and light-cone effects; on smaller scales with far more clustering modes, we retain the computational benefit of the power spectrum analysis aided by fast Fourier transforms. This approach is particularly suited to the likelihood analysis of local primordial non-Gaussianity $f_textrm{NL}$ through the scale-dependent halo bias, and we demonstrate its applicability with $N$-body simulations. We also release our public code Harmonia (https://github.com/MikeSWang/Harmonia) for galaxy clustering likelihood inference in spherical Fourier or hybrid-basis analyses.
Upcoming galaxy surveys will allow us to probe the growth of the cosmic large-scale structure with improved sensitivity compared to current missions, and will also map larger areas of the sky. This means that in addition to the increased precision in observations, future surveys will also access the ultra-large scale regime, where commonly neglected effects such as lensing, redshift-space distortions and relativistic corrections become important for calculating correlation functions of galaxy positions. At the same time, several approximations usually made in these calculations, such as the Limber approximation, break down at those scales. The need to abandon these approximations and simplifying assumptions at large scales creates severe issues for parameter estimation methods. On the one hand, exact calculations of theoretical angular power spectra become computationally expensive, and the need to perform them thousands of times to reconstruct posterior probability distributions for cosmological parameters makes the approach unfeasible. On the other hand, neglecting relativistic effects and relying on approximations may significantly bias the estimates of cosmological parameters. In this work, we quantify this bias and investigate how an incomplete modeling of various effects on ultra-large scales could lead to false detections of new physics beyond the standard $Lambda$CDM model. Furthermore, we propose a simple debiasing method that allows us to recover true cosmologies without running the full parameter estimation pipeline with exact theoretical calculations. This method can therefore provide a fast way of obtaining accurate values of cosmological parameters and estimates of exact posterior probability distributions from ultra-large scale observations.
We present cosmological constraints from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) using a combined analysis of angular clustering of red galaxies and their cross-correlation with weak gravitational lensing of background galaxies. We use a 139 square degree contiguous patch of DES data from the Science Verification (SV) period of observations. Using large scale measurements, we constrain the matter density of the Universe as Omega_m = 0.31 +/- 0.09 and the clustering amplitude of the matter power spectrum as sigma_8 = 0.74 +/- 0.13 after marginalizing over seven nuisance parameters and three additional cosmological parameters. This translates into S_8 = sigma_8(Omega_m/0.3)^{0.16} = 0.74 +/- 0.12 for our fiducial lens redshift bin at 0.35 <z< 0.5, while S_8 = 0.78 +/- 0.09 using two bins over the range 0.2 <z< 0.5. We study the robustness of the results under changes in the data vectors, modelling and systematics treatment, including photometric redshift and shear calibration uncertainties, and find consistency in the derived cosmological parameters. We show that our results are consistent with previous cosmological analyses from DES and other data sets and conclude with a joint analysis of DES angular clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing with Planck CMB data, Baryon Accoustic Oscillations and Supernova type Ia measurements.
We study how well we can reconstruct the 2-point clustering of galaxies on linear scales, as a function of mass and luminosity, using the halo occupation distribution (HOD) in several semi-analytical models (SAMs) of galaxy formation from the Millennium Simulation. We find that HOD with Friends of Friends groups can reproduce galaxy clustering better than gravitationally bound haloes. This indicates that Friends of Friends groups are more directly related to the clustering of these regions than the bound particles of the overdensities. In general we find that the reconstruction works at best to 5% accuracy: it underestimates the bias for bright galaxies. This translates to an overestimation of 50% in the halo mass when we use clustering to calibrate mass. We also found a degeneracy on the mass prediction from the clustering amplitude that affects all the masses. This effect is due to the clustering dependence on the host halo substructure, an indication of assembly bias. We show that the clustering of haloes of a given mass increases with the number of subhaloes, a result that only depends on the underlying matter distribution. As the number of galaxies increases with the number of subhaloes in SAMs, this results in a low bias for the HOD reconstruction. We expect this effect to apply to other models of galaxy formation, including the real universe, as long as the number of galaxies incresases with the number of subhaloes. We have also found that the reconstructions of galaxy bias from the HOD model fails for low mass haloes with M = 3-5x10^11 Msun/h. We find that this is because galaxy clustering is more strongly affected by assembly bias for these low masses.
Using dark matter simulations we show how halo bias is determined by local density and not by halo mass. This is not totally surprising, as according to the peak-background split model, local density is the property that constraints bias at large scales. Massive haloes have a high clustering because they reside in high density regions. Small haloes can be found in a wide range of environments which determine their clustering amplitudes differently. This contradicts the assumption of standard Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) models that the bias and occupation of haloes is determined solely by their mass. We show that the bias of central galaxies from semi-analytic models of galaxy formation as a function of luminosity and colour is not correctly predicted by the standard HOD model. Using local density instead of halo mass the HOD model correctly predicts galaxy bias. These results indicate the need to include information about local density and not only mass in order to correctly apply HOD analysis in these galaxy samples. This new model can be readily applied to observations and has the advantage that the galaxy density can be directly observed, in contrast with the dark matter halo mass.
The accuracy of photometric redshifts (photo-zs) particularly affects the results of the analyses of galaxy clustering with photometrically-selected galaxies (GCph) and weak lensing. In the next decade, space missions like Euclid will collect photometric measurements for millions of galaxies. These data should be complemented with upcoming ground-based observations to derive precise and accurate photo-zs. In this paper, we explore how the tomographic redshift binning and depth of ground-based observations will affect the cosmological constraints expected from Euclid. We focus on GCph and extend the study to include galaxy-galaxy lensing (GGL). We add a layer of complexity to the analysis by simulating several realistic photo-z distributions based on the Euclid Consortium Flagship simulation and using a machine learning photo-z algorithm. We use the Fisher matrix formalism and these galaxy samples to study the cosmological constraining power as a function of redshift binning, survey depth, and photo-z accuracy. We find that bins with equal width in redshift provide a higher Figure of Merit (FoM) than equipopulated bins and that increasing the number of redshift bins from 10 to 13 improves the FoM by 35% and 15% for GCph and its combination with GGL, respectively. For GCph, an increase of the survey depth provides a higher FoM. But the addition of faint galaxies beyond the limit of the spectroscopic training data decreases the FoM due to the spurious photo-zs. When combining both probes, the number density of the sample, which is set by the survey depth, is the main factor driving the variations in the FoM. We conclude that there is more information that can be extracted beyond the nominal 10 tomographic redshift bins of Euclid and that we should be cautious when adding faint galaxies into our sample, since they can degrade the cosmological constraints.