498 research outputs found
Constraining Omega using weak gravitational lensing by clusters
The morphology of galaxy clusters reflects the epoch at which they formed and
hence depends on the value of the mean cosmological density, Omega. Recent
studies have shown that the distribution of dark matter in clusters can be
mapped from analysis of the small distortions in the shapes of background
galaxies induced by weak gravitational lensing in the cluster potential. We
construct new statistics to quantify the morphology of clusters which are
insensitive to limitations in the mass reconstruction procedure. By simulating
weak gravitational lensing in artificial clusters grown in numerical
simulations of the formation of clusters in three different cosmologies, we
obtain distributions of a quadrupole statistic which measures global deviations
from spherical symmetry in a cluster. These distributions are very sensitive to
the value of Omega_0 and, as a result, lensing observations of a small number
of clusters should be sufficient to place broad constraints on Omega_{0} and
certainly to distinguish between the extreme values of 0.2 and 1.Comment: Submitted to MNRAS. Compressed postscript also available at
ftp://star-ftp.dur.ac.uk/pub/preprints/wcf2.ps.g
Extending the halo mass resolution of -body simulations
We present a scheme to extend the halo mass resolution of N-body simulations
of the hierarchical clustering of dark matter. The method uses the density
field of the simulation to predict the number of sub-resolution dark matter
haloes expected in different regions. The technique requires as input the
abundance of haloes of a given mass and their average clustering, as expressed
through the linear and higher order bias factors. These quantities can be
computed analytically or, more accurately, derived from a higher resolution
simulation as done here. Our method can recover the abundance and clustering in
real- and redshift-space of haloes with mass below at to better than 10%. We demonstrate the
technique by applying it to an ensemble of 50 low resolution, large-volume
-body simulations to compute the correlation function and covariance matrix
of luminous red galaxies (LRGs). The limited resolution of the original
simulations results in them resolving just two thirds of the LRG population. We
extend the resolution of the simulations by a factor of 30 in halo mass in
order to recover all LRGs. With existing simulations it is possible to generate
a halo catalogue equivalent to that which would be obtained from a -body
simulation using more than 20 trillion particles; a direct simulation of this
size is likely to remain unachievable for many years. Using our method it is
now feasible to build the large numbers of high-resolution large volume mock
galaxy catalogues required to compute the covariance matrices necessary to
analyse upcoming galaxy surveys designed to probe dark energy.Comment: 11 pages, 7 Figure
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