359 research outputs found
Galaxy Quenching from Cosmic Web Detachment
We propose the Cosmic Web Detachment (CWD) model, a framework to interpret
the star-formation history of galaxies in a cosmological context. The CWD model
unifies several starvation mechanisms known to disrupt or stop star formation
into one single physical framework. Galaxies begin accreting star-forming gas
at early times via a network of primordial filaments, simply related to the
pattern of density fluctuations in the initial conditions. But when
shell-crossing occurs on intergalactic scales, this pattern is disrupted, and
the galaxy detaches from its primordial filaments, ending the accretion of cold
gas. We argue that CWD encompasses known external processes halting star
formation, such as harassment, strangulation and starvation. On top of these
external processes, internal feedback processes such as AGN contribute to stop
in star formation as well.
By explicitly pointing out the non-linear nature of CWD events we introduce a
simple formalism to identify CWD events in N-body simulations. With it we
reproduce and explain, in the context of CWD, several observations including
downsizing, the cosmic star formation rate history, the galaxy mass-color
diagram and the dependence of the fraction of red galaxies with mass and local
density.Comment: 20 pages, accepted for publication in OJA. High-res version:
http://skysrv.pha.jhu.edu/~miguel/Papers/CWD/ms.pd
A halo bias function measured deeply into voids without stochasticity
We study the relationship between dark-matter haloes and matter in the MIP
-body simulation ensemble, which allows precision measurements of this
relationship, even deeply into voids. What enables this is a lack of
discreteness, stochasticity, and exclusion, achieved by averaging over hundreds
of possible sets of initial small-scale modes, while holding fixed large-scale
modes that give the cosmic web. We find (i) that dark-matter-halo formation is
greatly suppressed in voids; there is an exponential downturn at low densities
in the otherwise power-law matter-to-halo density bias function. Thus, the
rarity of haloes in voids is akin to the rarity of the largest clusters, and
their abundance is quite sensitive to cosmological parameters. The exponential
downturn appears both in an excursion-set model, and in a model in which
fluctuations evolve in voids as in an open universe with an effective
proportional to a large-scale density. We also find that (ii) haloes
typically populate the average halo-density field in a super-Poisson way, i.e.
with a variance exceeding the mean; and (iii) the rank-order-Gaussianized halo
and dark-matter fields are impressively similar in Fourier space. We compare
both their power spectra and cross-correlation, supporting the conclusion that
one is roughly a strictly-increasing mapping of the other. The MIP ensemble
especially reveals how halo abundance varies with `environmental' quantities
beyond the local matter density; (iv) we find a visual suggestion that at fixed
matter density, filaments are more populated by haloes than clusters.Comment: Changed to version accepted by MNRA
Straightening the Density-Displacement Relation with a Logarithmic Transform
We investigate the use of a logarithmic density variable in estimating the
Lagrangian displacement field, motivated by the success of a logarithmic
transformation in restoring information to the matter power spectrum. The
logarithmic relation is an extension of the linear relation, motivated by the
continuity equation, in which the density field is assumed to be proportional
to the divergence of the displacement field; we compare the linear and
logarithmic relations by measuring both of these fields directly in a
cosmological N-body simulation. The relative success of the logarithmic and
linear relations depends on the scale at which the density field is smoothed.
Thus we explore several ways of measuring the density field, including
Cloud-In-Cell smoothing, adaptive smoothing, and the (scale-independent)
Delaunay tessellation, and we use both a Fourier space and a geometrical
tessellation approach to measuring the divergence. We find that the relation
between the divergence of the displacement field and the density is
significantly tighter with a logarithmic density variable, especially at low
redshifts and for very small (~2 Mpc/h) smoothing scales. We find that the
grid-based methods are more reliable than the tessellation-based method of
calculating both the density and the divergence fields, though in both cases
the logarithmic relation works better in the appropriate regime, which
corresponds to nonlinear scales for the grid-based methods and low densities
for the tessellation-based method.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted to Ap
Interpolating Masked Weak Lensing Signal with Karhunen-Loeve Analysis
We explore the utility of Karhunen Loeve (KL) analysis in solving practical
problems in the analysis of gravitational shear surveys. Shear catalogs from
large-field weak lensing surveys will be subject to many systematic
limitations, notably incomplete coverage and pixel-level masking due to
foreground sources. We develop a method to use two dimensional KL eigenmodes of
shear to interpolate noisy shear measurements across masked regions. We explore
the results of this method with simulated shear catalogs, using statistics of
high-convergence regions in the resulting map. We find that the KL procedure
not only minimizes the bias due to masked regions in the field, it also reduces
spurious peak counts from shape noise by a factor of ~ 3 in the cosmologically
sensitive regime. This indicates that KL reconstructions of masked shear are
not only useful for creating robust convergence maps from masked shear
catalogs, but also offer promise of improved parameter constraints within
studies of shear peak statistics.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures; submitted to Ap
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