English

Sampling Artifact in Volume Weighted Velocity Measurement.--- II. Detection in simulations and comparison with theoretical modelling

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-03-10 v3

Abstract

Measuring the volume weighted velocity power spectrum suffers from a severe systematic error, due to imperfect sampling of the velocity field from inhomogeneous distribution of dark matter particles/halos in simulations or galaxies with velocity measurement. This "sampling artifact" depends on both the mean particle number density nˉP\bar{n}_P and the intrinsic large scale structure (LSS) fluctuation in the particle distribution. (1) We report robust detection of this sampling artifact in N-body simulations. It causes 12\sim 12% underestimation of the velocity power spectrum at k=0.1k=0.1h/Mpc for samples with nˉP=6×103\bar{n}_P=6\times10^{-3} (Mpc/h)3^{-3}. This systematic underestimation increases with decreasing nˉP\bar{n}_P and increasing kk. Its dependence on the intrinsic LSS fluctuations is also robustly detected. (2) All these findings are expected by our theoretical modelling in paper I \cite{Zhang14}. In particular, the leading order theoretical approximation agrees quantitatively well with simulation result for nˉP6×104\bar{n}_P\gtrsim6\times 10^{-4}(Mpc/h)3^{-3}. Furthermore, we provide an ansatz to take high order terms into account. It improves the model accuracy to 1\lesssim1% at k0.1k\lesssim0.1h/Mpc over 3 orders of magnitude in nˉP\bar{n}_P and over typical LSS clustering from z=0z=0 to z=2z=2. (3) The sampling artifact is determined by the deflection D{\bf D} field, which is straightforwardly available in both simulations and data of galaxy velocity. Hence the sampling artifact in the velocity power spectrum measurement can be self-calibrated within our framework. By applying such self-calibration in simulations, it becomes promising to determine the {\it real} large scale velocity bias of 1013M10^{13}M_\odot halos with 1\sim 1% accuracy, and that of lower mass halos by better accuracy. ...[abridged]

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1409.6809,
  title  = {Sampling Artifact in Volume Weighted Velocity Measurement.--- II. Detection in simulations and comparison with theoretical modelling},
  author = {Yi Zheng and Pengjie Zhang and Yipeng Jing},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.6809},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

11 pages, 11 figures. More arguments added, match the PRD accepted version