Baryonic Feedback across Halo Mass: Impact on the Matter Power Spectrum

TL;DR

This study uses hydrodynamical simulations to quantify how baryonic feedback from galaxy formation suppresses the matter power spectrum, especially around group-scale halos, affecting weak lensing observations and cosmological inferences.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of baryonic suppression effects across halo masses and proposes methods to incorporate these effects into cosmological models.

Findings

Group-scale halos dominate power suppression at $k\sim2-30\,h\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$

Reproducing suppression requires matter redistribution beyond virial radii

Weak lensing deviations are most detectable around group-scale halos

Abstract

Upcoming weak-lensing surveys will probe the matter distribution at a few percent level on nonlinear scales ($k>1\,{\rm h\,Mpc}^{-1}$) where baryonic feedback from galaxy formation modifies the clustering of matter. Using the IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulations, we quantify the mass and radial dependence of baryonic suppression of the matter power spectrum by selectively replacing matter around the center of halos out to a specified radius in the collisionless run with that around their full-physics counterparts. We find that group-scale halos with $\log M_{\rm 200m}/h^{-1}M_\odot \in[13, 14]$ dominate the suppression, contributing a large fraction of the total reduction in power at $k\sim2-30\,h\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, with smaller suppression on either sides of this mass bin. Correctly reproducing the full suppression of the power spectrum requires accounting for matter redistribution (while enforcing mass conservation) beyond the virial radius of each halo. We show that the same group-scale regime produces the most detectable deviations in the weak gravitational lensing of background galaxies measured around foreground galaxy groups binned by mass or richness. Such a lensing signal could be a powerful observational test of feedback models together with SZ measurements. Our results motivate emulators that jointly predict the matter power spectrum and halo-matter cross-power spectrum including baryonic effects, enabling unbiased cosmological inference from small scales.