Recovering the characteristic halo mass of rare populations from clustering: a benchmark using the Millennium Simulation
We measure how accurately the characteristic halo mass of a rare, massive population can be recovered from clustering alone, using dark matter haloes in the Millennium simulation, where the true masses are known. Massive samples of 25 to 10000 haloes are cross-correlated against field reference samples of 5000 to 50000 haloes at six redshifts over $0 \leq z \leq 5.29$. The bias is measured at $r = 8\,h^{-1}\,\mathrm{Mpc}$ and inverted to return a characteristic mass, which we compare with the mean logarithmic halo mass measured directly from the simulation. Across 192 configurations the characteristic mass is recovered with a median absolute offset of $0.103$ dex. We show that (i) accuracy depends only weakly on the number of rare objects while the uncertainty falls from $\pm 0.71$ dex at 25 objects to $\pm 0.08$ dex at 10000; (ii) enlarging the smallest samples gives the greatest return, with a doubling from 25 to 50 objects reducing the uncertainty by about a third, against a tenth from 5000 to 10000; and (iii) the reference population carries an error of its own, which propagates coherently into every cross-correlation measured against it and is not reduced by observing more rare objects. Working with haloes rather than galaxies isolates the clustering measurement from the galaxy--halo connection, providing a benchmark before population-specific complications are introduced. For the best configurations, the uncertainty contributed by the calibration of the bias--mass relation, at $\sim 0.07$ dex, already matches that of the measurement itself.