Answers from the void: VIDE and its applications

TL;DR

VIDE is a versatile, open-source toolkit for identifying and analyzing cosmic voids in galaxy surveys and simulations, offering extensive features for void characterization and data processing.

Contribution

The paper introduces an enhanced version of ZOBOV, called VIDE, which provides comprehensive void analysis tools and supports diverse input formats and applications.

Findings

VIDE successfully identifies cosmic voids in various datasets.

It enables detailed statistical and profile analysis of voids.

The toolkit has been applied to multiple cosmological studies.

Abstract

We discuss various applications of VIDE, the Void IDentification and Examination toolkit, an open-source Python/C++ code for finding cosmic voids in galaxy redshift surveys and N-body simulations. Based on a substantially enhanced version of ZOBOV, VIDE not only finds voids, but also summarizes their properties, extracts statistical information, and provides a Python-based platform for more detailed analysis, such as manipulating void catalogs and particle members, filtering, plotting, computing clustering statistics, stacking, comparing catalogs, and fitting density profiles. VIDE also provides significant additional functionality for pre-processing inputs: for example, VIDE can work with volume- or magnitude-limited galaxy samples with arbitrary survey geometries, or dark matter particles or halo catalogs in a variety of common formats. It can also randomly subsample inputs and includes a Halo Occupation Distribution model for constructing mock galaxy populations. VIDE has been used for a wide variety of applications, from discovering a universal density profile to estimating primordial magnetic fields, and is publicly available at http://bitbucket.org/cosmicvoids/vide_public and http://www.cosmicvoids.net.