Redshift-space effects in voids and their impact on cosmological tests. Part I: the void size function

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework to understand how redshift-space distortions and the Alcock-Paczynski effect influence void identification and statistics, aiming to improve cosmological constraints from galaxy surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a new model linking real and redshift space voids, accounting for RSD and AP effects, and tests it with simulations to enhance cosmological analyses.

Findings

Redshift-space voids have real-space counterparts with size and position shifts.

The model accurately recovers void abundance in simulations.

Cosmology-dependent effects significantly impact void statistics.

Abstract

Voids are promising cosmological probes. Nevertheless, every cosmological test based on voids must necessarily employ methods to identify them in redshift space. Therefore, redshift-space distortions (RSD) and the Alcock-Paczynski effect (AP) have an impact on the void identification process itself generating distortion patterns in observations. Using a spherical void finder, we developed a statistical and theoretical framework to describe physically the connection between the identification in real and redshift space. We found that redshift-space voids above the shot noise level have a unique real-space counterpart spanning the same region of space, they are systematically bigger and their centres are preferentially shifted along the line of sight. The expansion effect is a by-product of RSD induced by tracer dynamics at scales around the void radius, whereas the off-centring effect constitutes a different class of RSD induced at larger scales by the global dynamics of the whole region containing the void. The volume of voids is also altered by the fiducial cosmology assumed to measure distances, this is the AP change of volume. These three systematics have an impact on cosmological statistics. In this work, we focus on the void size function. We developed a theoretical framework to model these effects and tested it with a numerical simulation, recovering the statistical properties of the abundance of voids in real space. This description depends strongly on cosmology. Hence, we lay the foundations for improvements in current models of the abundance of voids in order to obtain unbiased cosmological constraints from redshift surveys.