The e-MANTIS emulator: fast and accurate predictions of the halo mass function in $f(R)$CDM and $w$CDM cosmologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, accurate emulator for predicting the halo mass function across various non-standard cosmologies, trained on extensive N-body simulations, enabling efficient cosmological analysis.

Contribution

The authors develop and publicly release a novel Gaussian process-based emulator for the halo mass function in $f(R)$ and $w$CDM cosmologies, extending previous models to larger parameter spaces.

Findings

Emulator achieves ~1.5% error for $w$CDM and ~4% for $f(R)$CDM at $z=0$.

Predicts halo mass functions for redshifts up to 1.5 and halo masses above $10^{13}\,h^{-1}M_\odot$.

Provides self-estimated errors based on cosmological parameters, halo mass, and redshift.

Abstract

In this work, we present a novel emulator of the halo mass function, which we implement in the framework of the e-mantis emulator of $f(R)$ gravity models. We also extend e-mantis to cover a larger cosmological parameter space and to include models of dark energy with a constant equation of state $w$CDM. We use a Latin hypercube sampling of the $w$CDM and $f(R)$CDM cosmological parameter spaces, over a wide range, and realize a large suite of more than $10000$ $N$-body simulations of different volume, mass resolution and random phase of the initial conditions. For each simulation in the suite, we generate halo catalogues using the friends-of-friends halo finder, as well as the spherical overdensity algorithm for different overdensity thresholds. We decompose the corresponding halo mass functions on a B-spline basis, and use this decomposition to train an emulator based on Gaussian processes. The resulting emulator is able to predict the halo mass function for redshifts $\leq 1.5$ and for halo masses $M_h\geq10^{13}\,h^{-1}M_\odot$. The typical HMF errors for SO haloes with $\Delta=200\mathrm{c}$ at $z=0$ in $w$CDM (respectively $f(R)$CDM) are of order of $\epsilon_0\simeq1.5\%$ ($\epsilon_0\simeq4\%$) up to a transition mass $M_t\simeq2\cdot10^{14}\,h^{-1}M_\odot$ ($M_t\simeq6\cdot10^{13}\,h^{-1}M_\odot$). For larger masses, the errors are dominated by shot-noise and scale as $\epsilon_0\cdot\left(M_h/M_t\right)^\alpha$ with $\alpha\simeq0.9$ ($\alpha\simeq0.4$) up to $M_h \sim 10^{15}\,h^{-1}M_\odot$. Independently of this general trend, the emulator is able to provide an estimation of its own error as a function of the cosmological parameters, halo mass, and redshift. The e-mantis emulator, which is publicly available, can be used to obtain fast and accurate predictions of the halo mass function in the $f(R)$CDM and $w$CDM non-standard cosmological models.