DEMNUni: The clustering of large-scale structures in the presence of massive neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper uses large, high-resolution N-body simulations to analyze how massive neutrinos affect large-scale structure clustering, showing that nonlinear evolution is mainly driven by cold dark matter and that existing models can be adapted for massive neutrino cosmologies.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the nonlinear evolution of large-scale structures in massive neutrino cosmologies is dominated by cold dark matter and extends existing models to accurately account for neutrino effects.

Findings

Nonlinear evolution is primarily generated by cold dark matter.

The halofit formula calibrated on b d extsubscript{m} simulations applies to massive neutrino cosmologies.

Proper halo bias definition with respect to cold matter reduces systematic errors in growth rate measurements.

Abstract

(abridged) We analyse the clustering features of Large Scale Structures (LSS) in the presence of massive neutrinos, employing a set of large-volume, high-resolution cosmological N-body simulations, where neutrinos are treated as a separate collisionless fluid. The volume of 8$\cGpc$, combined with a resolution of about $8\times 10^{10}\Ms$ for the cold dark matter (CDM) component, represents a significant improvement over previous N-body simulations in massive neutrino cosmologies. We show that most of the nonlinear evolution is generated exclusively by the CDM component. We find that accounting only for the nonlinear evolution of the CDM power spectrum allows to recover the total matter power spectrum with the same accuracy as the massless case. Indeed, we show that, the most recent version of the \halofit\ formula calibrated on $\Lambda$CDM simulations can be applied directly to the linear CDM power spectrum without requiring additional fitting parameters in the massive case. As a second step, we study the abundance and clustering properties of CDM halos, confirming that, in massive neutrino cosmologies, the proper definition of the halo bias should be made with respect to the {\em cold} rather than the {\em total} matter distribution, as recently shown in the literature. Here we extend these results to the redshift space, finding that, when accounting for massive neutrinos, an improper definition of the linear bias can lead to a systematic error of about 1-$2 \%$ in the determination of the linear growth rate from anisotropic clustering. This result is quite important if we consider that future spectroscopic galaxy surveys, as \eg\ Euclid, are expected to measure the linear growth-rate with statistical errors less than about $3 \%$ at $z\lesssim1$.