Tests of Acoustic Scale Shifts in Halo-based Mock Galaxy Catalogues

Abstract

We utilise mock catalogues from high-accuracy cosmological $N$-body simulations to quantify shifts in the recovery of the acoustic scale that could potentially result from galaxy clustering bias. The relationship between galaxies and dark matter halos presents a complicated source of systematic errors in modern redshift surveys, particularly when aiming to make cosmological measurements to sub-percent precision. Apart from a scalar, linear bias parameter accounting for the density contrast ratio between matter tracers and the true matter distribution, other types of galaxy bias, such as assembly and velocity biases, may also significantly alter clustering signals from small to large scales. We create mocks based on generalised halo occupation populations of 36 periodic boxes from the \abacuscosmos release with. In a total volume of $48 \, h^{-3} \mathrm{Gpc}^3$, we test various biased models along with an unbiased base case. Two reconstruction methods are applied to galaxy samples and the apparent acoustic scale is derived by fitting the two-point correlation function multipoles. With respect to the baseline, we find a $0.3\%$ shift in the line-of-sight acoustic scale for one variation in the satellite galaxy population, and we find an $0.7\%$ shift for an extreme level of velocity bias of the central galaxies. All other bias models are consistent with zero shift at the $0.2\%$ level after reconstruction. We note that the bias models explored are relatively large variations, producing sizeable and likely distinguishable changes in small-scale clustering, the modelling of which would further calibrate the BAO standard ruler.