Halo stochasticity in global clustering analysis

Abstract

In the present work we study the statistics of haloes, which in the halo model determines the distribution of galaxies. Haloes are known to be biased tracer of dark matter, and at large scales it is usually assumed there is no intrinsic stochasticity between the two fields. Following the work of Seljak & Warren (2004), we explore how correct this assumption is and, moving a step further, we try to qualify the nature of stochasticity. We use Principal Component Analysis applied to the outputs of a cosmological N-body simulation to: (1) explore the behaviour of stochasticity in the correlation between haloes of different masses; (2) explore the behaviour of stochasticity in the correlation between haloes and dark matter. We show results obtained using a catalogue with 2.1 million haloes, from a PMFAST simulation with box size of 1000h^{-1}Mpc. In the relation between different populations of haloes we find that stochasticity is not-negligible even at large scales. In agreement with the conclusions of Tegmark & Bromley (1999) who studied the correlations of different galaxy populations, we found that the shot-noise subtracted stochasticity is qualitatively different from `enhanced' shot noise and, specifically, it is dominated by a single stochastic eigenvalue. We call this the `minimally stochastic' scenario, as opposed to shot noise which is `maximally stochastic'. In the correlation between haloes and dark matter, we find that stochasticity is minimized, as expected, near the dark matter peak (k ~ 0.02 h Mpc^{-1} for a LambdaCDM cosmology) and, even at large scales, it is of the order of 15 per cent above the shot noise. Moreover, we find that the reconstruction of the dark matter distribution is improved when we use eigenvectors as tracers of the bias. [Abridged]