arXiv subjects

Vincent Desjacques

Publications and source records attributed to Vincent Desjacques.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web

A large-scale hydrodynamical cosmological simulation, Horizon-AGN, is used to investigate the alignment between the spin of galaxies and the cosmic filaments above redshift 1.2. The analysis of more than 150 000 galaxies per time step in the redshift range 1.2<z<1.8 with morphological diversity shows that the spin of low-mass blue galaxies is preferentially aligned with their neighbouring filaments, while high-mass red galaxies tend to have a perpendicular spin. The reorientation of the spin of massive galaxies is provided by galaxy mergers, which are significant in their mass build-up. We find that the stellar mass transition from alignment to misalignment happens around 3.10^10 M_sun. Galaxies form in the vorticity-rich neighbourhood of filaments, and migrate towards the nodes of the cosmic web as they convert their orbital angular momentum into spin. The signature of this process can be traced to the properties of galaxies, as measured relative to the cosmic web. We argue that a strong source of feedback such as active galactic nuclei is mandatory to quench in situ star formation in massive galaxies and promote various morphologies. It allows mergers to play their key role by reducing post-merger gas inflows and, therefore, keeping spins misaligned with cosmic filaments.

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arXiv2014

Peculiar velocities in redshift space: formalism, N-body simulations and perturbation theory

Direct measurements of peculiar velocities of galaxies and clusters of galaxies can in principle provide explicit information on the three dimensional mass distribution, but this information is modulated by the fact that velocity field is sampled at galaxy positions, and is thus probing galaxy momentum. We derive expressions for the cross power spectrum between the density and momentum field and the auto spectrum of the momentum field in redshift space, by extending the distribution function method to these statistics. The resulting momentum cross and auto power spectra in redshift space are expressed as infinite sums over velocity moment correlators in real space, as is the case for the density power spectrum in redshift space. We compute each correlator using Eulerian perturbation theory (PT) and halo biasing model and compare the resulting redshift-space velocity statistics to those measured from N-body simulations for both dark matter and halos. We find that in redshift space linear theory predictions for the density-momentum cross power spectrum as well as for the momentum auto spectrum fail to predict the N-body results at very large scales. On the other hand, our nonlinear PT prediction for these velocity statistics, together with real-space power spectrum for dark matter from simulations, improves the accuracy for both dark matter and halos. We also present the same analysis in configuration space, computing the redshift-space pairwise mean infall velocities and velocity correlation function and compare to nonlinear PT.

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arXiv2014

Measuring nonlocal Lagrangian peak bias

We investigate nonlocal Lagrangian bias contributions involving gradients of the linear density field, for which we have predictions from the excursion set peak formalism. We begin by writing down a bias expansion which includes all the bias terms, including the nonlocal ones. Having checked that the model furnishes a reasonable fit to the halo mass function, we develop a 1-point cross-correlation technique to measure bias factors associated with 2-distributed quantities. We validate the method with numerical realizations of peaks of Gaussian random fields before we apply it to N-body simulations. We focus on the lowest (quadratic) order nonlocal contributions. We can reproduce our measurement of χ_{10} if we allow for an offset between the Lagrangian halo center-of-mass and the peak position. The sign and magnitude of χ_{10} is consistent with Lagrangian haloes sitting near linear density maxima. The resulting contribution to the halo bias can safely be ignored for M = 10^13 Msun/h, but could become relevant at larger halo masses. For the second nonlocal bias χ_{01} however, we measure a much larger magnitude than predicted by our model. We speculate that some of this discrepancy might originate from nonlocal Lagrangian contributions induced by nonspherical collapse.

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arXiv2013

Bias deconstructed: Unravelling the scale dependence of halo bias using real space measurements

We explore the scale dependence of halo bias using real space cross-correlation measurements in N-body simulations and in Pinocchio, an algorithm based on Lagrangian Perturbation Theory. Recent work has shown how to interpret such real space measurements in terms of k-dependent bias in Fourier space, and how to remove the k-dependence to reconstruct the k-independent peak-background split halo bias parameters. We compare our reconstruction of the linear bias, which requires no free parameters, with previous estimates from N-body simulations which were obtained directly in Fourier space at large scales, and find very good agreement. Our reconstruction of the quadratic bias is similarly parameter-free, although in this case there are no previous Fourier space measurements to compare with. Our analysis of N-body simulations explicitly tests the predictions of the excursion set peaks (ESP) formalism of Paranjape et al. (2013) for the scale dependence of bias; we find that the ESP predictions accurately describe our measurements. In addition, our measurements in Pinocchio serve as a useful, successful consistency check between Pinocchio and N-body simulations that is not accessible to traditional measurements.

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arXiv2013

The mass of the Milky Way and M31 using the method of least action

We constrain the most likely range of masses for the Milky Way and M31 using an application of the Numerical Action Method (NAM) that optimizes the fit to observed parameters over a large ensemble of NAM-generated solutions. Our 95% confidence level mass ranges, 1.5-4.5 x 10^12 m_sun for MW and 1.5-5.5 x 10^12 m_sun for M31, are consistent with the upper range of estimates from other methods and suggests that a larger proportion of the total mass becomes detectable when the peculiar motions of many nearby satellites are taken into account in the dynamical analysis. We test the method against simulated Local Group catalogs extracted from the Millennium Run to confirm that mass predictions are consistent with actual galaxy halo masses.

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arXiv2013

Distribution function approach to redshift space distortions. Part V: perturbation theory applied to dark matter halos

Numerical simulations show that redshift space distortions (RSD) introduce strong scale dependence in the power spectra of halos, with ten percent deviations relative to linear theory predictions even on relatively large scales (k<0.1h/Mpc) and even in the absence of satellites (which induce Fingers-of-God, FoG, effects). If unmodeled these effects prevent one from extracting cosmological information from RSD surveys. In this paper we use perturbation theory (PT) and halo biasing model and apply it to the distribution function approach to RSD, in which RSD is decomposed into several correlators of density weighted velocity moments. We model each of these correlators using PT and compare the results to simulations over a wide range of halo masses and redshifts. We find that with an introduction of a physically motivated halo biasing, and using dark matter power spectra from simulations, we can reproduce the simulation results at a percent level on scales up to k~0.15h/Mpc at z=0, without the need to have free FoG parameters in the model.

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arXiv2013

Non-Gaussian bias: insights from discrete density peaks

Corrections induced by primordial non-Gaussianity to the linear halo bias can be computed from a peak-background split or the widespread local bias model. However, numerical simulations clearly support the prediction of the former, in which the non-Gaussian amplitude is proportional to the linear halo bias. To understand better the reasons behind the failure of standard Lagrangian local bias, in which the halo overdensity is a function of the local mass overdensity only, we explore the effect of a primordial bispectrum on the 2-point correlation of discrete density peaks. We show that the effective local bias expansion to peak clustering vastly simplifies the calculation. We generalize this approach to excursion set peaks and demonstrate that the resulting non-Gaussian amplitude, which is a weighted sum of quadratic bias factors, precisely agrees with the peak-background split expectation, which is a logarithmic derivative of the halo mass function with respect to the normalisation amplitude. We point out that statistics of thresholded regions can be computed using the same formalism. Our results suggest that halo clustering statistics can be modelled consistently (in the sense that the Gaussian and non-Gaussian bias factors agree with peak-background split expectations) from a Lagrangian bias relation only if the latter is specified as a set of constraints imposed on the linear density field. This is clearly not the case of standard Lagrangian local bias. Therefore, one is led to consider additional variables beyond the local mass overdensity.

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arXiv2013

High Performance P3M N-body code: CUBEP3M

This paper presents CUBEP3M, a publicly-available high performance cosmological N-body code and describes many utilities and extensions that have been added to the standard package. These include a memory-light runtime SO halo finder, a non-Gaussian initial conditions generator, and a system of unique particle identification. CUBEP3M is fast, its accuracy is tuneable to optimize speed or memory, and has been run on more than 27,000 cores, achieving within a factor of two of ideal weak scaling even at this problem size. The code can be run in an extra-lean mode where the peak memory imprint for large runs is as low as 37 bytes per particles, which is almost two times leaner than other widely used N-body codes. However, load imbalances can increase this requirement by a factor of two, such that fast configurations with all the utilities enabled and load imbalances factored in require between 70 and 120 bytes per particles. CUBEP3M is well designed to study large scales cosmological systems, where imbalances are not too large and adaptive time-stepping not essential. It has already been used for a broad number of science applications that require either large samples of non-linear realizations or very large dark matter N-body simulations, including cosmological reionization, halo formation, baryonic acoustic oscillations, weak lensing or non-Gaussian statistics. We discuss the structure, the accuracy, known systematic effects and the scaling performance of the code and its utilities, when applicable.

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arXiv2013

All-Sky Analysis of the General Relativistic Galaxy Power Spectrum

We perform an all-sky analysis of the general relativistic galaxy power spectrum using the well-developed spherical Fourier decomposition. Spherical Fourier analysis expresses the observed galaxy fluctuation in terms of the spherical harmonics and spherical Bessel functions that are angular and radial eigenfunctions of the Helmholtz equation, providing a natural orthogonal basis for all-sky analysis of the large-scale mode measurements. Accounting for all the relativistic effects in galaxy clustering, we compute the spherical power spectrum and its covariance matrix and compare it to the standard three-dimensional power spectrum to establish a connection. The spherical power spectrum recovers the three-dimensional power spectrum at each wavenumber k with its angular dependence mu_k encoded in angular multipole l, and the contributions of the line-of-sight projection to galaxy clustering such as the gravitational lensing effect can be readily accommodated in the spherical Fourier analysis. A complete list of formulas for computing the relativistic spherical galaxy power spectrum is also presented.

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arXiv2013

Peak-Background Split, Renormalization, and Galaxy Clustering

We present a derivation of two-point correlations of general tracers in the peak-background split (PBS) framework by way of a rigorous definition of the PBS argument. Our expressions only depend on connected matter correlators and "renormalized" bias parameters with clear physical interpretation, and are independent of any coarse-graining scale. This result should be contrasted with the naive expression derived from a local bias expansion of the tracer number density with respect to the matter density perturbation δ_L coarse-grained on a scale R_L. In the latter case, the predicted tracer correlation function receives contributions of order <δ_L^n> at each perturbative order n, whereas, in our formalism, these are absorbed in the PBS bias parameters at all orders. Further, this approach naturally predicts both a scale-dependent bias ~ k^2 such as found for peaks of the density field, and the scale-dependent bias induced by primordial non-Gaussianity in the initial conditions. The only assumption made about the tracers is that their abundance at a given position depends solely on the matter distribution within a finite region around that position.

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arXiv2013

Halo Stochasticity from Exclusion and non-linear Clustering

The clustering of galaxies in ongoing and upcoming galaxy surveys contains a wealth of cosmological information, but extracting this information is a non-trivial task since galaxies and their host haloes are stochastic tracers of the matter density field. This stochasticity is usually modeled as Poisson shot noise, which is constant as a function of wavenumber with amplitude given by 1/n, where n is the number density of galaxies. Here we use dark matter haloes in N-body simulations to show evidence for deviations from this simple behaviour and develop models that explain the behaviour of the large scale stochasticity. First, haloes are extended, non-overlapping objects, i.e., their correlation function needs to go to -1 on small scales. This leads to a negative correction to the stochasticity relative to the Poisson value at low wavenumber k, decreasing to zero for wavenumbers large compared to the inverse exclusion scale. Second, haloes show a non-linear enhancement of clustering outside the exclusion scale, leading to a positive stochasticity correction. Both of these effects go to zero for high-k, making the stochasticity scale dependent even for k<0.1 h/Mpc. We show that the corrections in the low-k regime are the same in Eulerian and Lagrangian space, but that the transition scale is pushed to smaller scales for haloes observed at present time, relative to the initial conditions. These corrections vary with halo mass and redshift. We also discuss simple applications of these effects to the galaxy samples with non-vanishing satellite fraction, where the stochasticity can again deviate strongly from the fiducial Poisson expectation. Overall these effects affect the clustering of galaxies at a level of a few percent even on very large scales and need to be modelled properly if we want to extract high precision cosmological information from the upcoming galaxy surveys.

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arXiv2013

Testing the Running of non-Gaussianity through the CMB mu-distortion and the Halo Bias

The primordial non-Gaussianity parameters fNL and tauNL may be scale-dependent. We investigate the capability of future measurements of the CMB mu-distortion, which is very sensitive to small scales, and of the large-scale halo bias to test the running of local non-Gaussianity. We show that, for an experiment such as PIXIE, a measurement of the mu-temperature correlation can pin down the spectral indices n_fNL and n_tauNL to values of the order of 0.3 if fNL = 20 and tauNL = 5000. A similar value can be achieved with an all-sky survey extending to redshift z ~ 1. In the particular case in which the two spectral indices are equal, as predicted in models where the cosmological perturbations are generated by a single-field other than the inflaton, then the 1-sigma error on the scale-dependence of the non-linearity parameters goes down to 0.2.

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arXiv2013

Excursion set peaks: a self-consistent model of dark halo abundances and clustering

We describe how to extend the excursion set peaks framework so that its predictions of dark halo abundances and clustering can be compared directly with simulations. These extensions include: a halo mass definition which uses the TopHat filter in real space; the mean dependence of the critical density for collapse delta_c on halo mass m; and the scatter around this mean value. All three of these are motivated by the physics of triaxial rather than spherical collapse. A comparison of the resulting mass function with N-body results shows that, if one uses delta_c(m) and its scatter as determined from simulations, then all three are necessary ingredients for obtaining ~10% accuracy. E.g., assuming a constant value of delta_c with no scatter, as motivated by the physics of spherical collapse, leads to many more massive halos than seen in simulations. The same model is also in excellent agreement with N-body results for the linear halo bias, especially at the high mass end where the traditional peak-background split argument applied to the mass function fit is known to underpredict the measured bias by ~10%. In the excursion set language, our model is about walks centered on special positions (peaks) in the initial conditions -- we discuss what it implies for the usual calculation in which all walks contribute to the statistics.

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arXiv2013

A local bias approach to the clustering of discrete density peaks

Maxima of the linear density field form a point process that can be used to understand the spatial distribution of virialized halos that collapsed from initially overdense regions. However, owing to the peak constraint, clustering statistics of discrete density peaks are difficult to evaluate. For this reason, local bias schemes have received considerably more attention in the literature thus far. In this paper, we show that the 2-point correlation function of maxima of a homogeneous and isotropic Gaussian random field can be thought of, up to second order at least, as arising from a local bias expansion formulated in terms of rotationally invariant variables. This expansion relies on a unique smoothing scale, which is the Lagrangian radius of dark matter halos. The great advantage of this local bias approach is that it circumvents the difficult computation of joint probability distributions. We demonstrate that the bias factors associated with these rotational invariants can be computed using a peak-background split argument, in which the background perturbation shifts the corresponding probability distribution functions. Consequently, the bias factors are orthogonal polynomials averaged over those spatial locations that satisfy the peak constraint. In particular, asphericity in the peak profile contributes to the clustering at quadratic and higher order, with bias factors given by generalized Laguerre polynomials. We speculate that our approach remains valid at all orders, and that it can be extended to describe clustering statistics of any point process of a Gaussian random field. Our results will be very useful to model the clustering of discrete tracers with more realistic collapse prescriptions involving the tidal shear for instance.

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arXiv2012

Optimal Weighting in Galaxy Surveys: Application to Redshift-Space Distortions

Using multiple tracers of large-scale structure allows to evade the limitations imposed by sampling variance for some parameters of interest in cosmology. We demonstrate the optimal way of carrying out a multitracer analysis in a galaxy redshift survey by considering the principal components of the shot noise matrix from two-point clustering statistics. We show how to construct two tracers that maximize the benefits of sampling variance and shot noise cancellation using optimal weights. On the basis of high-resolution N-body simulations of dark matter halos we apply this technique to the analysis of redshift-space distortions and demonstrate how constraints on the growth rate of structure formation can be substantially improved. The primary limitation are nonlinear effects, which cause significant biases in the method already at scales of k<0.1h/Mpc, suggesting the need to develop nonlinear models of redshift-space distortions in order to extract the maximum information from future redshift surveys. Nonetheless we find gains of a factor of a few in constraints on the growth rate achievable when merely the linear regime of a galaxy survey like EUCLID is considered.

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arXiv2012

Measuring primordial non-Gaussianity with weak-lensing surveys

We study the ability of future weak lensing (WL) surveys to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity of the local type. We use a large ensemble of simulated WL maps with survey specifications relevant to Euclid and LSST. The simulations assume Cold Dark Matter cosmologies that vary certain parameters around fiducial values: the non-Gaussianity parameter f_NL, the matter density parameter Omega_m, the amplitude of the matter power spectrum sigma_8, the spectral index of the primordial power spectrum n_s, and the dark-energy equation-of-state parameter w_0. We assess the sensitivity of the cosmic shear correlation functions, the third-order aperture mass statistics, and the abundance of shear peaks to these parameters. We find that each of the considered probes provides unmarginalized constraints of Delta f_NL ~ 20 on f_NL. Marginalized constraints from any individual WL probe are much weaker due to strong correlations between parameters. However, the parameter errors can be substantially reduced by combining information from different WL probes. Combining all WL probes yields the following marginal (68% confidence level) uncertainties: Delta f_NL ~ 50, Delta Omega_m ~ 0.002, Delta sigma_8 ~ 0.004, Delta n_s ~ 0.007, and Delta w_0 ~ 0.03. We examine the bias induced by neglecting f_NL on the constraints on the other parameters. We find sigma_8 and w_0 to be the most affected. Moreover, neglecting non-Gaussianity leads to a severe underestimation of the uncertainties in the other cosmological parameters.

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arXiv2012

Testing Multi-Field Inflation with Galaxy Bias

Multi-field models of inflation predict an inequality between the amplitude tauNL of the collapsed limit of the four-point correlator of the primordial curvature perturbation and the amplitude fNL of the squeezed limit of its three-point correlator. While a convincing detection of non-Gaussianity through the squeezed limit of the three-point correlator would rule out all single-field models, a robust confirmation or disproval of the inequality between tauNL and fNL would provide crucial information about the validity of multi-field models of inflation. In this paper, we discuss to which extent future measurements of the scale-dependence of galaxy bias can test multi-field inflationary scenarios. The strong degeneracy between the effect of a non-vanishing fNL and tauNL on halo bias can be broken by considering multiple tracer populations of the same surveyed volume. If halos down to 1e13 Msun/h are resolved in a survey of volume 25(Gpc/h)^3, then testing multi-field models of inflation at the 3-σlevel would require, for instance, a detection of tauNL at the level of tauNL~1e5 given a measurement of a local bispectrum with amplitude fNL~10. However, we find that disproving multi-field models of inflation with measurements of the non-Gaussian bias only will be very challenging, unless |fNL| > 80 and one can achieve a halo mass resolution of 1e10 Msun/h.

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arXiv2012

Distribution function approach to redshift space distortions, Part III: halos and galaxies

It was recently shown that the power spectrum in redshift space can be written as a sum of cross-power spectra between number weighted velocity moments. We investigate the properties of these power spectra for simulated galaxies and dark matter halos and compare them to the dark matter power spectra, generalizing the concept of the bias. Because all of the quantities are number weighted this approach is well defined even for sparse systems such as massive halos, in contrasts to the previous approaches to RSD where velocity correlations have been explored. We find that the number density weighting leads to a strong scale dependence of the bias terms for momentum density auto-correlation and cross-correlation with density. This trend becomes more significant for the more biased halos and leads to an enhancement of RSD power relative to the linear theory. Fingers-of-god effects, which in this formalism come from the correlations of the higher order moments beyond the momentum density, lead to smoothing of the power spectrum and can reduce this enhancement of power, but are relatively small for halos with no small-scale velocity dispersion. In comparison, for a more realistic galaxy sample with satellites the velocity dispersion generated by satellite motions inside the halos leads to a larger power suppression on small scales, but this depends on the satellite fraction. We investigate several statistics such as the two-dimensional power spectrum, its multipole moments, its powers of mu^2, and configuration space statistics. Overall we find that the nonlinear effects in realistic galaxy samples such as luminous red galaxies affect the redshift space clustering on very large scales: for example, the quadrupole moment is affected by 10% for k<0.1h/mpc, which means that these effects need to be understood if we want to extract cosmological information from the redshift space distortions.

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