Halo mass distribution reconstruction across the cosmic web

Abstract

We study the relation between halo mass and its environment from a probabilistic perspective. We find that halo mass depends not only on local dark matter density, but also on non-local quantities such as the cosmic web environment and the halo-exclusion effect. Given these accurate relations, we have developed the HADRON-code (Halo mAss Distribution ReconstructiON), a technique which permits us to assign halo masses to a distribution of haloes in three-dimensional space. This can be applied to the fast production of mock galaxy catalogues, by assigning halo masses, and reproducing accurately the bias for different mass cuts. The resulting clustering of the halo populations agree well with that drawn from the BigMultiDark $N$-body simulation: the power spectra are within 1-$σ$ up to scales of $k=0.2\,h\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, when using augmented Lagrangian perturbation theory based mock catalogues. Only the most massive haloes show a larger deviation. For these, we find evidence of the halo-exclusion effect. A clear improvement is achieved when assigning the highest masses to haloes with a minimum distance separation. We also compute the 2- and 3-point correlation functions, and find an excellent agreement with $N$-body results. Our work represents a quantitative application of the cosmic web classification. It can have further interesting applications in the multi-tracer analysis of the large-scale structure for future galaxy surveys.