The importance of the cosmic web and halo substructure for power spectra

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2015-11, Vol.454 (1), p.708-723
• Main Authors: Pace, Francesco, Manera, Marc, Bacon, David J., Crittenden, Robert, Percival, Will J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Approximation; Astronomy; Catalogues; Dark matter; Density; Dynamical systems; Halos; Power spectra; Simulation; Star & galaxy formation; Substructures
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv2019

In this work, we study the relevance of the cosmic web and substructures on the matter and lensing power spectra measured from halo mock catalogues extracted from the N-body simulations. Since N-body simulations are computationally expensive, it is common to use faster methods that approximate the dark matter field as a set of haloes. In this approximation, we replace mass concentrations in N-body simulations by a spherically symmetric Navarro–Frenk–White halo density profile. We also consider the full mass field as the sum of two distinct fields: dark matter haloes (M > 9 × 1012 M⊙ h −1) and particles not included into haloes. Mock haloes reproduce well the matter power spectrum, but underestimate the lensing power spectrum on large and small scales. For sources at z s = 1 the lensing power spectrum is underestimated by up to 40 per cent at ℓ ≈ 104 with respect to the simulated haloes. The large-scale effect can be alleviated by combining the mock catalogue with the dark matter distribution outside the haloes. In addition, to evaluate the contribution of substructures we have smeared out the intrahalo substructures in an N-body simulation while keeping the halo density profiles unchanged. For the matter power spectrum the effect of this smoothing is only of the order of 5 per cent, but for lensing substructures and ellipticity are much more important: for ℓ ≈ 104 modifications to the internal structure contribute to 30 per cent of the total spectrum. These findings have important implications in the way mock catalogues have to be created, suggesting that some approximate methods currently used for galaxy surveys will be inadequate for future weak lensing surveys.