English

Emulating galaxy and peculiar velocity clustering on non-linear scales

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-02-04 v1

Abstract

We explore the potential of cross-correlating galaxies and peculiar velocities on non-linear scales to enhance cosmological constraints. Leveraging the \textsc{AbacusSummit} simulation suite and the halo occupation distribution (HOD) formalism, we train emulator models to describe the non-linear clustering of galaxies and velocities in redshift space. Our analysis demonstrates that combining galaxy and peculiar velocity clustering, provides tighter constraints on both HOD and cosmological parameters, particularly on σ8\sigma_8 and w0w_0. We further apply our models to realistic mock catalogues, reproducing the expected density and peculiar velocity errors of type-Ia supernovae and Tully-Fisher/fundamental plane measurements for the combined ZTF and DESI measurements. While systematic biases arise in the HOD parameters, the cosmological constraints remain unbiased, yielding 3.8%3.8\% precision measurement on fσ8f\sigma_8 compared to 4.7%4.7\% using galaxy clustering alone. We demonstrate that, while combining tracers with realistic velocity measurements still yields improvement, the gains are diminished, highlighting the need for further efforts to reduce velocity measurement uncertainties and correct observational systematics on small scales.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.03382,
  title  = {Emulating galaxy and peculiar velocity clustering on non-linear scales},
  author = {T. Dumerchat and J. Bautista and C. Ravoux and J. Aguilar and S. Ahlen and S. BenZvi and D. Bianchi and D. Brooks and T. Claybaugh and A. de la Macorra and P. Doel and S. Ferraro and J. E. Forero-Romero and E. Gaztañaga and S. Gontcho A Gontcho and G. Gutierrez and C. Hahn and C. Howlett and M. Ishak and R. Joyce and D. Kirkby and A. Kremin and C. Lamman and M. Landriau and L. Le Guillou and M. Manera and R. Miquel and S. Nadathur and W. J. Percival and F. Prada and I. Pérez-Ràfols and G. Rossi and E. Sanchez and D. Schlegel and M. Schubnell and J. Silber and D. Sprayberry and G. Tarlé and B. A. Weaver and H. Zou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03382},
  year   = {2026}
}