The Abundance of High-Redshift Objects as a Probe of Non-Gaussian Initial Conditions

By S. Matarrese, L. Verde, Raul Jimenez. 2000

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The observed abundance of high-redshift galaxies and clusters contains precious information about the properties of the initial perturbations. We present a method to compute analytically the number density of objects as a function of mass and redshift for a range of physically motivated non-Gaussian models. In these models the non-Gaussianity can be dialed from zero and is assumed to be small. We compute the probability density function for the smoothed dark matter density field, and we extend the Press-Schechter approach to mildly non-Gaussian density fields. The abundance of high-redshift objects can be directly related to the non-Gaussianity parameter and thus to the physical processes that generated deviations from the Gaussian behavior. Even a skewness parameter of order 0.1 implies a dramatic change in the predicted abundance of z ≳ 1 objects. Observations from the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) and X-ray satellites (XMM) can be used to accurately measure the amount of non-Gaussianity in the primordial density field.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fddb975d034e865cb0013fe5aab3a6a40f95723

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Citations in the corpus

Large-scale non-Gaussian mass function and halo bias: tests on N-body simulations (2009, methodology): “In addition, 1 We correct here a typographical error in equation (68) of Matarrese et al. (2000), where d ln σM should be dσM .”
Halo mass function and scale-dependent bias from N-body simulations with non-Gaussian initial conditions (2008, methodology): “Most of the analytic derivations of the non-Gaussian halo mass function (e.g. Matarrese et al. 2000; LoVerde et al 2008) are based on the extended Press–Schechter model (Press & Schechter 1974; Bond et al. 1991) which, in the Gaussian case, is known to produce inaccurate estimates of halo abundance…”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III DR9 Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity (2012, background): “As shown in, e.g., Matarrese et al. (2000), primordial nonGaussianity alters the expected mass function of dark matter halos, with positive f localNL yielding more high-mass dark matter halos.”
Primordial non-Gaussianity from the large-scale structure (2010, methodology): “In [94], it is the level excursion probability”
Constraining primordial non-Gaussianity with future galaxy surveys (2011, background): “The halo mass function is modified by the presence of PNG (Matarrese et al. 2000; LoVerde et al. 2008; Maggiore & Riotto 2010a; Lam & Sheth 2009).”
The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, methodology): “…parameters and to probe additional physics like the non-Gaussianity of large-scale structure (Bernardeau et al., 1997; van Waerbeke et al., 1999; Matarrese et al., 2000; Van Waerbeke et al., 2001; Verde et al., 2001; Takada and Jain, 2003, 2004; Munshi et al., 2008; Jeong and Komatsu, 2009;…”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “Thus small values of fNL are potentially detectable by measuring the abundance of massive dark matter halos as traced by galaxies and galaxy clusters at z & 1 [649].”
The Effect of Primordial Non-Gaussianity on Halo Bias (2008, methodology): “A powerful technique is based on the abundance (Matarrese et al. 2000; Verde et al. 2001; LoVerde et al. 2007; Robinson & Baker 2000; Robinson et al. 2000) and clustering (Grinstein & Wise 1986; Matarrese et al. 1986; Lucchin et al. 1988) of rare events such as dark matter density peaks as they…”
Primordial black holes in non-Gaussian regimes (2013, methodology): “The constraints obtained in this manner differ by O(10%) to those obtained from a full Press-Schechter calculation which includes a window function to smooth the curvature perturbation, as performed in [37, 38].”