English

An accurate halo model for fitting non-linear cosmological power spectra and baryonic feedback models

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2016-05-11 v3

Abstract

We present an optimized variant of the halo model, designed to produce accurate matter power spectra well into the non-linear regime for a wide range of cosmological models. To do this, we introduce physically motivated free parameters into the halo-model formalism and fit these to data from high-resolution NN-body simulations. For a variety of Λ\LambdaCDM and wwCDM models the halo-model power is accurate to 5\simeq 5 per cent for k10hMpck\leq 10h\,\mathrm{Mpc} and z2z\leq 2. An advantage of our new halo model is that it can be adapted to account for the effects of baryonic feedback on the power spectrum. We demonstrate this by fitting the halo model to power spectra from the OWLS hydrodynamical simulation suite via parameters that govern halo internal structure. We are able to fit all feedback models investigated at the 5 per cent level using only two free parameters, and we place limits on the range of these halo parameters for feedback models investigated by the OWLS simulations. Accurate predictions to high-kk are vital for weak lensing surveys, and these halo parameters could be considered nuisance parameters to marginalize over in future analyses to mitigate uncertainty regarding the details of feedback. Finally, we investigate how lensing observables predicted by our model compare to those from simulations and from HALOFIT for a range of kk-cuts and feedback models and quantify the angular scales at which these effects become important. Code to calculate power spectra from the model presented in this paper can be found at https://github.com/alexander-mead/hmcode

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.07833,
  title  = {An accurate halo model for fitting non-linear cosmological power spectra and baryonic feedback models},
  author = {Alexander Mead and John Peacock and Catherine Heymans and Shahab Joudaki and Alan Heavens},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.07833},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

17 pages, 10 figures, published in MNRAS, v2 - minor text additions, closely matched published version, v3 - corrected equation (B10) in the appendix