arXiv subjects

Shaun Cole

Publications and source records attributed to Shaun Cole.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

A clear and measurable signature of modified gravity in the galaxy velocity field

The velocity field of dark matter and galaxies reflects the continued action of gravity throughout cosmic history. We show that the low-order moments of the pairwise velocity distribution, $v_{12}$, are a powerful diagnostic of the laws of gravity on cosmological scales. In particular, the projected line-of-sight galaxy pairwise velocity dispersion, $σ_{12}(r)$, is very sensitive to the presence of modified gravity. Using a set of high-resolution N-body simulations we compute the pairwise velocity distribution and its projected line-of-sight dispersion for a class of modified gravity theories: the chameleon \fR gravity and Galileon gravity (cubic and quartic). The velocities of dark matter halos with a wide range of masses would exhibit deviations from General Relativity at the $(5-10)σ$ level. We examine strategies for detecting these deviations in galaxy redshift and peculiar velocity surveys. If detected, this signature would be a "smoking gun" for modified gravity.

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arXiv2014

N-body Dark Matter Haloes with simple Hierarchical Histories

We present a new algorithm which groups the subhaloes found in cosmological N- body simulations by structure finders such as SUBFIND into dark matter haloes whose formation histories are strictly hierarchical. One advantage of these `Dhaloes' over the commonly used friends-of-friends (FoF) haloes is that they retain their individual identity in cases when FoF haloes are artificially merged by tenuous bridges of particles or by an overlap of their outer diffuse haloes. Dhaloes are thus well-suited for modelling galaxy formation and their merger trees form the basis of the Durham semi-analytic galaxy formation model, GALFORM. Applying the Dhalo construction to the LambdaCDM Millennium-2 simulation we find that approximately 90% of Dhaloes have a one-to-one, bijective match with a corresponding FoF halo. The remaining 10% are typically secondary components of large FoF haloes. Although the mass functions of both types of haloes are similar, the mass of Dhaloes correlates much more tightly with the virial mass, M200, than FoF haloes. Approximately 80% of FoF and bijective and non-bijective Dhaloes are relaxed according to standard criteria. For these relaxed haloes all three types have similar concentration-M200 relations and, at fixed mass, the concentration distributions are described accurately by log-normal distributions.

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arXiv2014

A Possible Cold Imprint of Voids on the Microwave Background Radiation

We measure the average temperature decrement on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) produced by voids selected in the SDSS DR7 spectroscopic redshift galaxy catalog, spanning redshifts $0<z<0.44$. We find an imprint of amplitude between 2.6 and 2.9$μK$ as viewed through a compensated top-hat filter scaled to the radius of each void; we assess the statistical significance of the imprint at ~2$σ$. We make crucial use of $N$-body simulations to calibrate our analysis. As expected, we find that large voids produce cold spots on the CMB through the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect. However, we also find that small voids in the halo density field produce hot spots, because they reside in contracting, larger-scale overdense regions. This is an important effect to consider when stacking CMB imprints from voids of different radius. We have found that the same filter radius that gives the largest ISW signal in simulations also yields close to the largest detected signal in the observations. However, although it is low in significance, our measured signal is much higher-amplitude than expected from ISW in the concordance $Λ$CDM universe. The discrepancy is also at the ~2$σ$ level. We have demonstrated that our result is robust against the varying of thresholds over a wide range.

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arXiv2014

The Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in $f(R)$ gravity

We study the late-time Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect in $f(R)$ gravity using N-body simulations. In the $f(R)$ model under study, the linear growth rate is larger than that in general relativity (GR). This slows down the decay of the cosmic potential and induces a smaller ISW effect on large scales. Therefore, the $\dotΦ$ (time derivative of the potential) power spectrum at $k<0.1h$/Mpc is suppressed relative to that in GR. In the non-linear regime, relatively rapid structure formation in $f(R)$ gravity boosts the non-linear ISW effect relative to GR, and the $\dotΦ$ power spectrum at $k>0.1h$/Mpc is increased (100$\%$ greater on small scales at $z=0$). We explore the detectability of the ISW signal via stacking supercluster and supervoids. The differences in the corresponding ISW cold or hot spots are $\sim 20\%$ for structures of $\sim 100$Mpc/$h$. Such differences are greater for smaller structures, but the amplitude of the signal is lower. The high amplitude of ISW signal detected by Granett et al. can not explained in the $f(R)$ model. We find relatively big differences between $f(R)$ and GR in the transverse bulk motion of matter, and discuss its detectability via the relative frequency shifts of photons from multiple lensed images.

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arXiv2013

The Pan-STARRS1 Medium-Deep Survey: The role of galaxy group environment in the star formation rate versus stellar mass relation and quiescent fraction out to $z \sim 0.8$

Using a large sample of field and group galaxies drawn from the Pan-STARRS1 Medium-Deep Survey, we present the specific star formation rate (SSFR) - stellar mass (M*) relation, as well as the quiescent fraction versus M* relation in different environments. We confirm that the fraction of quiescent galaxies is strongly dependent on environment at a fixed stellar mass, but that the amplitude and the slope of the star-forming sequence is similar between the field and groups: in other words, the SSFR-density relation at a fixed stellar mass is primarily driven by the change in the star-forming and quiescent fractions between different environments rather than a global suppression in the star formation rate for the star-forming population. However, when we restrict our sample to the cluster-scale environments ($M>10^{14}M_{solar}$), we find a global reduction in the SSFR of the star forming sequence of $17\%$ at 4$σ$ confidence as opposed to its field counterpart. After removing the stellar mass dependence of the quiescent fraction seen in field galaxies, the excess in the quiescent fraction due to the environment quenching in groups and clusters is found to increase with stellar mass. We argue that these results are in favor of galaxy mergers to be the primary environment quenching mechanism operating in galaxy groups whereas strangulation is able to reproduce the observed trend in the environment quenching efficiency and stellar mass relation seen in clusters. Our results also suggest that the relative importance between mass quenching and environment quenching depends on stellar mass -- the mass quenching plays a dominant role in producing quiescent galaxies for more massive galaxies, while less massive galaxies are quenched mostly through the environmental effect, with the transition mass around $1-2\times10^{10}M_{solar}$ in the group/cluster environment. (abridged)

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arXiv2013

Constraining the WDM Particle Mass with Milky Way Satellites

Well-motivated particle physics theories predict the existence of particles (such as sterile neutrinos) which acquire non-negligible thermal velocities in the early universe. These particles could behave as warm dark matter (WDM) and generate a small-scale cutoff in the linear density power spectrum which scales approximately inversely with the particle mass. If this mass is of order a keV, the cutoff occurs on the scale of dwarf galaxies. Thus, in WDM models the abundance of small galaxies, such as the satellites that orbit in the halo of the Milky Way, depends on the mass of the warm particle. The abundance also scales with the mass of the host galactic halo. We use the \galform semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to calculate the properties of galaxies in universes in which the dark matter is warm. Using this method, we can compare the predicted satellite luminosity functions to the observed data for the Milky Way dwarf spheroidals, and determine a lower bound on the thermally produced WDM particle mass. This depends strongly on the value of the Milky Way halo mass and, to some extent, on the baryonic physics assumed; we examine both of these dependencies. For our fiducial model we find that for a particle mass of 3.3 keV (the 2$σ$ lower limit found by Viel et al. from a recent analysis of the Lyman-$α$ forest) the Milky Way halo mass is required to be $> 1.4 \times 10^{12}$ \msun. For this same fiducial model, we also find that all WDM particle masses are ruled out (at 95% confidence) if the halo of the Milky Way has a mass smaller than $1.1 \times 10^{12}$ \msun, while if the mass of the Galactic halo is greater than 1.8 $\times 10^{12}$ \msun, only WDM particle masses larger than 2 keV are allowed.

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arXiv2013

Pan-STARRS1: Galaxy Clustering in the Small Area Survey 2

The Pan-STARRS1 survey is currently obtaining imaging in 5 bands (grizy) for the $3π$ steradian survey, one of the largest optical surveys ever conducted. The finished survey will have spatially varying depth, due to the survey strategy. This paper presents a method to correct galaxy number counts and galaxy clustering for this potential systematic based on a simplified signal to noise measurement. A star and galaxy separation method calibrated using realistic synthetic images is also presented, along with an approach to mask bright stars. By using our techniques on a ~69 sq. degree region of science verification data this paper shows PS1 measurements of the two point angular correlation function as a function of apparent magnitude agree with measurements from deeper, smaller surveys. Clustering measurements appear reliable down to a magnitude limit of rps<22.5. Additionally, stellar contamination and false detection issues are discussed and quantified. This work is the second of two papers which pave the way for the exploitation of the full $3π$ survey for studies of large scale structure.

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arXiv2013

Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): galaxy radial alignments in GAMA groups

We constrain the distributions of projected radial alignment angles of satellite galaxy shapes within the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey group catalogue. We identify the galaxy groups using spectroscopic redshifts and measure galaxy projected ellipticities from Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging. With a sample of 3,850 groups with 13,655 satellite galaxies with high quality shape measurements, we find a less than 2-sigma signal of radial alignments in the mean projected ellipticity components and the projected position angle when using galaxy shape estimates optimized for weak lensing measurements. Our radial alignment measurement increases to greater than 3-sigma significance relative to the expectation for no alignments if we use 2-D Sérsic model fits to define galaxy orientations. Our weak measurement of radial alignments is in conflict with predictions from dark matter N-body simulations, which we interpret as evidence for large mis-alignments of baryons and dark matter in group and cluster satellites. Within our uncertainties, that are dominated by our small sample size, we find only weak and marginally significant trends of the radial alignment angle distributions on projected distance from the group centre, host halo mass, and redshift that could be consistent with a tidal torquing mechanism for radial alignments. Using our lensing optimized shape estimators, we estimate that intrinsic alignments of galaxy group members may contribute a systematic error to the mean differential projected surface mass density of groups inferred from weak lensing observations by -1 +/- 20% at scales around 300 kpc/h from the group centre assuming a photometric redshift r.m.s. error of 10%, and given our group sample with median redshift of 0.17 and median virial masses ~10^{13} h^{-1}M_{sun}.

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arXiv2013

Hierarchical clustering in chameleon $f(R)$ gravity

We use a suite of high resolution state-of-the-art N-body Dark Matter simulations of chameleon $f(R)$ gravity to study the higher order volume averaged correlation functions $\bar{ξ_n}$ together with the hierarchical $n$-th order correlation amplitudes $S_n=\barξ_n/\barξ_2^{n-1}$ and density distribution functions (PDF). We show that under the non-linear modifications of gravity the hierarchical scaling of the reduced cumulants is preserved. This is however characterised by significant changes of both the $\bar{ξ_n}$ and $S_n$'s values and their scale dependence with respect to General Relativity gravity (GR). In addition, we measure a significant increase of the non linear $σ_8$ parameter reaching $14, 5$ and 0.5% in excess of the GR value for the three flavours of our $f(R)$ models. We further note that the values of the reduced cumulants up to order $n=9$ are significantly increased in $f(R)$ gravity for all our models at small scales $R\simlt 30\hmpc$. In contrast the values of the hierarchical amplitudes, $S_n$'s, are smaller in $f(R)$ indicating that the modified gravity density distribution functions are deviating from the GR case. Furthermore we find that the redshift evolution of relative deviations of the $f(R)$ hierarchical correlation amplitudes is fastest at high and moderate redshifts $1\leq z \leq4$. The growth of these deviations significantly slows down in the low redshift universe. We also compute the PDFs and show that for scales below $\sim 20\hmpc$ they are significantly shifted in $f(R)$ gravity towards the low densities. Finally we discuss the implications of our theoretical predictions for measurements of the hierarchical clustering in galaxy redshifts surveys, including the important problems of the galaxy biasing and redshifts space distortions.

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arXiv2013

Probability Friends-of-Friends (PFOF) Group Finder: Performance Study and Observational Data Applications on Photometric Surveys

(Abridged) In tandem with observational datasets, we utilize realistic mock catalogs, based on a semi-analytic galaxy formation model, constructed specifically for Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Surveys in order to assess the performance of the Probability Friends-of-Friends (PFOF, Liu et al.) group finder, and aim to develop a grouping optimization method applicable to surveys like Pan-STARRS1. Producing mock PFOF group catalogs under a variety of photometric redshift accuracies (σΔz/(1+zs)), we find that catalog purities and completenesses from ``good' σΔz/(1+zs)) ~ 0.01) to ``poor' σΔz/(1+zs)) ~ 0.07) photo-zs gradually degrade respectively from 77% and 70% to 52% and 47%. To avoid model dependency of the mock for use on observational data we apply a ``subset optimization' approach, using spectroscopic-redshift group data from the target field to train the group finder for application to that field, as an alternative method for the grouping optimization. We demonstrate this approach using these spectroscopically identified groups as the training set, i.e. zCOSMOS groups for PFOF searches within PS1 Medium Deep Field04 (PS1MD04) and DEEP2 EGS groups for searches in PS1MD07. We ultimately apply PFOF to four datasets spanning the photo-z uncertainty range from 0.01 to 0.06 in order to quantify the dependence of group recovery performance on photo-z accuracy. We find purities and completenesses calculated from observational datasets broadly agree with their mock analogues. Further tests of the PFOF algorithm are performed via matches to X-ray clusters identified within the PS1MD04 and COSMOS footprints. Across over a decade in group mass, we find PFOF groups match ~85% of X-ray clusters in COSMOS and PS1MD04, but at a lower statistical significance in the latter.

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arXiv2013

Cosmological Constraints from applying SHAM to rescaled cosmological simulations

We place constraints on the matter density of the Universe and the amplitude of clustering using measurements of the galaxy two-point correlation function from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We generate model predictions for different cosmologies by populating rescaled N-body simulations with galaxies using the subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) technique. We find Omega-M = 0.29 +/- 0.03 and sigma-8 = 0.86 +/- 0.04 at 68% confidence from fitting the observed two-point galaxy correlation function of galaxies brighter than M_r = -18 in a volume limited sample of galaxies obtained by the SDSS. We discuss and quantify potential sources of systematic error, and conclude that while there is scope for improving its robustness, the technique presented in this paper provides a powerful low redshift constraint on the cosmological parameters that is complementary to other commonly used methods.

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arXiv2013

Lightcone mock catalogues from semi-analytic models of galaxy formation - I. Construction and application to the BzK colour selection

We introduce a method for constructing end-to-end mock galaxy catalogues using a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation, applied to the halo merger trees extracted from a cosmological N-body simulation. The mocks that we construct are lightcone catalogues, in which a galaxy is placed according to the epoch at which it first enters the past lightcone of the observer, and incorporate the evolution of galaxy properties with cosmic time. We determine the position between the snapshot outputs at which a galaxy enters the observer's lightcone by interpolation. As an application, we consider the effectiveness of the BzK colour selection technique, which was designed to isolate galaxies in the redshift interval 1.4<z<2.5. The mock catalogue is in reasonable agreement with the observed number counts of all BzK galaxies, as well as with the observed counts of the subsample of BzKs that are star-forming galaxies. We predict that over 75 per cent of the model galaxies with K_{AB}<=23, and 1.4<z<2.5, are selected by the BzK technique. Interloper galaxies, outside the intended redshift range, are predicted to dominate bright samples of BzK galaxies (i.e. with K_{AB}<=21). Fainter K-band cuts are necessary to reduce the predicted interloper fraction. We also show that shallow B-band photometry can lead to confusion in classifying BzK galaxies as being star-forming or passively evolving. Overall, we conclude that the BzK colour selection technique is capable of providing a sample of galaxies that is representative of the 1.4<z<2.5 galaxy population.

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arXiv2013

Spatial and luminosity distributions of galactic satellites

We investigate the luminosity functions (LFs) and projected number density profiles of galactic satellites around isolated primaries of different luminosities. We measure these quantities for model satellites placed into the Millennium and Millennium II dark matter simulations by the GALFORM semi-analytic galaxy formation model for different bins of primary galaxy magnitude and we investigate their dependence on satellite luminosity. We compare our model predictions to the data of Guo et al. from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 8 (SDSS DR8). First, we use a mock light-cone catalogue to verify that the method we used to count satellites in the SDSS DR8 is unbiased. We find that the radial distributions of model satellites are similar to those around comparable primary galaxies in the SDSS DR8, with only slight differences at low luminosities and small projected radii. However, when splitting the satellites by colour, the model and SDSS satellite systems no longer resemble one another, with many red model satellites, in contrast to the dominant blue fraction at similar luminosity in SDSS. The few model blue satellites are also significantly less centrally concentrated in the halo of their stacked primary than their SDSS counterparts. The implications of this result for the GALFORM model are discussed.

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arXiv2012

Dark Matter Halo Merger Histories Beyond Cold Dark Matter: I - Methods and Application to Warm Dark Matter

We describe a methodology to accurately compute halo mass functions, progenitor mass functions, merger rates and merger trees in non-cold dark matter universes using a self-consistent treatment of the generalized extended Press-Schechter formalism. Our approach permits rapid exploration of the subhalo population of galactic halos in dark matter models with a variety of different particle properties or universes with rolling, truncated, or more complicated power spectra. We make detailed comparisons of analytically derived mass functions and merger histories with recent warm dark matter cosmological N-body simulations, and find excellent agreement. We show that, once the accretion of smoothly distributed matter is accounted for, coarse-grained statistics such as the mass accretion history of halos can be almost indistinguishable between cold and warm dark matter cases. However, the halo mass function and progenitor mass functions differ significantly, with the warm dark matter cases being strongly suppressed below the free-streaming scale of the dark matter. We demonstrate the importance of using the correct solution for the excursion set barrier first-crossing distribution in warm dark matter - if the solution for a flat barrier is used instead the truncation of the halo mass function is much slower, leading to an overestimate of the number of low mass halos.

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arXiv2012

Satellite Galaxy Number Density Profiles in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We study the spatial distribution of satellite galaxies around isolated primaries using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic and photometric galaxy catalogues. We select isolated primaries from the spectroscopic sample and search for potential satellites in the much deeper photometric sample. For specific luminosity primaries we obtain robust statistical results by stacking as many as ~50, 000 galaxy systems. We find no evidence for any anistropy in the satellite galaxy distribution relative to the major axes of the primaries. We derive accurate projected number density profiles of satellites down to 4 magnitudes fainter than their primaries. We find the normalized satellite profiles generally have a universal form and can be well fitted by projected NFW profiles. The NFW concentration parameter increases with decreasing satellite luminosity while being independent of the luminosity of the primary except for very bright primaries. The profiles of the faintest satellites show deviations from the NFW form with an excess at small galactocentric projected distances. In addition, we quantify how the radial distribution of satellites depends on the colour of the satellites and on the colour and concentration of their primaries.

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arXiv2012

The Shapes and Alignments of Dark Matter Halos

We present measurements of the triaxial dark matter halo shapes and alignment correlation functions in the Millennium and Millennium-2 dark matter N-body simulations. These two simulations allow us to measure the distributions of halo shapes down to 10% of the virial radius over a halo mass range of 6E9 - 2E14 M_sun/h. We largely confirm previous results on the distributions of halo axis ratios as a function of halo mass, but we find that the median angle between halo major axes at different halo radii can vary by a factor of 2 between the Millennium-1 and 2 simulations because of the different mass resolution. Thus, error in the shape determinations from limited resolution is potentially degenerate with the misalignment of halo inner and outer shapes used to constrain Brightest Cluster Galaxy alignments in previous works. We also present simplifying parameterizations for the 3-D halo-mass alignment correlation functions that are necessary ingredients for triaxial halo models of large-scale structure and models of galaxy intrinsic alignments as contaminants for cosmic shear surveys. We measure strong alignments between halos of all masses and the surrounding dark matter overdensities out to several tens of Mpc/h, in agreement with observed shear-galaxy and cluster shape correlations. We use these measurements to forecast the contribution to the weak lensing signal around galaxy clusters from correlated mass along the line-of-sight. For prolate clusters with major axes aligned with the line-of-sight the fraction of the weak lensing signal from mass external to the cluster can be twice that predicted if the excess halo alignment correlation is assumed to be zero.

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arXiv2011

The formation of shell galaxies similar to NGC 7600 in the cold dark matter cosmogony

We present new deep observations of 'shell' structures in the halo of the nearby elliptical galaxy NGC 7600, alongside a movie of galaxy formation in a cold dark matter universe (available at http://www.virgo.dur.ac.uk/shell-galaxies). The movie, based on an ab initio cosmological simulation, shows how continuous accretion of clumps of dark matter and stars creates a swath of diffuse circumgalactic structures. The disruption of a massive clump on a near-radial orbit creates a complex system of transient concentric shells which bare a striking resemblance to those of NGC 7600. With the aid of the simulation we interpret NGC 7600 in the context of the CDM model.

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arXiv2011

Maximum Likelihood Random Galaxy Catalogues and Luminosity Function Estimation

We present a new algorithm to generate a random (unclustered) version of an magnitude limited observational galaxy redshift catalogue. It takes into account both galaxy evolution and the perturbing effects of large scale structure. The key to the algorithm is a maximum likelihood (ML) method for jointly estimating both the luminosity function (LF) and the overdensity as a function of redshift. The random catalogue algorithm then works by cloning each galaxy in the original catalogue, with the number of clones determined by the ML solution. Each of these cloned galaxies is then assigned a random redshift uniformly distributed over the accessible survey volume, taking account of the survey magnitude limit(s) and, optionally, both luminosity and number density evolution. The resulting random catalogues, which can be employed in traditional estimates of galaxy clustering, make fuller use of the information available in the original catalogue and hence are superior to simply fitting a functional form to the observed redshift distribution. They are particularly well suited to studies of the dependence of galaxy clustering on galaxy properties as each galaxy in the random catalogue has the same list of attributes as measured for the galaxies in the genuine catalogue. The derivation of the joint overdensity and LF estimator reveals the limit in which the ML estimate reduces to the standard 1/Vmax LF estimate, namely when one makes the prior assumption that the are no fluctuations in the radial overdensity. The new ML estimator can be viewed as a generalization of the 1/Vmax estimate in which Vmax is replaced by a density corrected Vdc,max.

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