Understanding higher-order nonlocal halo bias at large scales by combining the power spectrum with the bispectrum

TL;DR

This paper extends the nonlocal bias model to third order and demonstrates that including these terms allows for accurate simultaneous modeling of the power spectrum and bispectrum of halos in simulations, highlighting the importance of nonlocal bias in large-scale structure analysis.

Contribution

The study introduces a third-order nonlocal bias model and shows it effectively explains halo statistics, improving upon the local bias approach.

Findings

The third-order nonlocal bias model fits simulation data well up to k~0.1h/Mpc.

Including nonlocal bias terms improves the modeling of halo statistics.

The results align with simple coevolution predictions, though some discrepancies remain.

Abstract

Understanding the relation between underlying matter distribution and biased tracers such as galaxy or dark matter halo is essential to extract cosmological information from ongoing or future galaxy redshift surveys. At sufficiently large scales such as the BAO scale, a standard approach for the bias problem on the basis of the perturbation theory (PT) is to assume the `local bias' model in which the density field of biased tracers is deterministically expanded in terms of matter density field at the same position. The higher-order bias parameters are then determined by combining the power spectrum with higher-order statistics such as the bispectrum. As is pointed out by recent studies, however, nonlinear gravitational evolution naturally induces nonlocal bias terms even if initially starting only with purely local bias. As a matter of fact, previous works showed that the second-order nonlocal bias term, which corresponds to the gravitational tidal field, is important to explain the characteristic scale-dependence of the bispectrum. In this paper we extend the nonlocal bias term up to third order, and investigate whether the PT-based model including nonlocal bias terms can simultaneously explain the power spectrum and the bispectrum of simulated halos in $N$-body simulations. We show that the power spectrum, including density and momentum, and the bispectrum between halo and matter in $N$-body simulations can be simultaneously well explained by the model including up to third-order nonlocal bias terms up to k~0.1h/Mpc. Also, the results seem in a good agreement with theoretical predictions of a simple coevolution picture, although the agreement is not perfect. These demonstration clearly shows a failure of the local bias model even at such large scales, and we conclude that nonlocal bias terms should be consistently included in order to model statistics of halos. [abridged]