Towards an accurate model of the redshift space clustering of halos in the quasilinear regime

TL;DR

This paper develops a highly accurate, fully analytic model for redshift space clustering of halos in the quasilinear regime, crucial for interpreting galaxy survey data and testing cosmological theories.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative Gaussian streaming model for real-to-redshift space mapping and assesses its accuracy against simulations, improving modeling precision for cosmological analyses.

Findings

Model achieves <0.5% accuracy for monopole at s>10 Mpc/h

Model achieves <2% accuracy for quadrupole at s>25 Mpc/h

Bias from real space clustering matches pairwise velocity predictions within 1%

Abstract

Observations of redshift-space distortions in spectroscopic galaxy surveys offer an attractive method for measuring the build-up of cosmological structure, which depends both on the expansion rate of the Universe and our theory of gravity. Galaxies occupy dark matter halos, whose redshift space clustering has a complex dependence on bias that cannot be inferred from the behavior of matter. We identify two distinct corrections on quasilinear scales (~ 30-80 Mpc/h): the non-linear mapping between real and redshift space positions, and the non-linear suppression of power in the velocity divergence field. We model the first non-perturbatively using the scale-dependent Gaussian streaming model, which we show is accurate at the <0.5 (2) per cent level in transforming real space clustering and velocity statistics into redshift space on scales s>10 (s>25) Mpc/h for the monopole (quadrupole) halo correlation functions. We use perturbation theory to predict the real space pairwise halo velocity statistics. Our fully analytic model is accurate at the 2 per cent level only on scales s > 40 Mpc/h. Recent models that neglect the corrections from the bispectrum and higher order terms from the non-linear real-to-redshift space mapping will not have the accuracy required for current and future observational analyses. Finally, we note that our simulation results confirm the essential but non-trivial assumption that on large scales, the bias inferred from real space clustering of halos is the same one that determines their pairwise infall velocity amplitude at the per cent level.