The effects of galaxy formation on the matter power spectrum: a challenge for precision cosmology

By Marcel van Daalen, Joop Schaye, C. Booth, C. D. L. Observatory, L. U. M. P. I. F. E. Physics. 2011

359 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Upcoming weak lensing surveys, such as LSST, EUCLID and WFIRST, aim to measure the matter power spectrum with unprecedented accuracy. In order to fully exploit these observations, models are needed that, given a set of cosmological parameters, can predict the non-linear matter power spectrum at the level of 1 per cent or better for scales corresponding to comoving wavenumbers 0.1 k 10h Mpc −1 . We have employed the large suite of simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project to investigate the effects of various baryonic processes on the matter power spectrum. In addition, we have examined the distribution of power over different mass components, the back-reaction of the baryons on the cold dark matter and the evolution of the dominant effects on the matter power spectrum. We find that single baryonic processes are capable of changing the power spectrum by up to several tens of per cent. Our simulation that includes AGN feedback, which we consider to be our most realistic simulation as, unlike those used in previous studies, it has been shown to solve the overcooling problem and to reproduce optical and X-ray observations of groups of galaxies, predicts a decrease in power relative to a dark matter only simulation ranging, at z = 0, from 1 per cent at k ≈ 0.3h Mpc −1 to 10 per cent at k ≈ 1h Mpc −1 and to 30 per cent at k ≈ 10h Mpc −1 . This contradicts the naive view that baryons raise the power through cooling, which is the dominant effect only for k 70h Mpc −1 . Therefore, baryons, and particularly AGN feedback, cannot be ignored in theoretical power spectra for k 0.3h Mpc −1 . It will thus be necessary to improve our understanding of feedback processes

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/947492454bf3ce9b71ecd46634b8d17b4fafaa61

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

hmcode-2020: improved modelling of non-linear cosmological power spectra with baryonic feedback (2020, methodology): “The parameters B from equation (18) and η from equation (17) were fitted to data from the original OWLS simulations (Schaye et al. 2010; van Daalen et al. 2011) to provide a model that approximately matched the suppression due to AGN feedback.”
Cosmological constraints from a combination of galaxy clustering and lensing – I. Theoretical framework (2012, background): “Van Daalen et al. (2011) have shown that realistic amounts of alignment, as present in numerical simulations of structure formation in a ΛCDM cosmology, has an effect on the correlation functions that is not larger than ∼ 2 percent.”
Cosmological constraints from cosmic shear two-point correlation functions with HSC survey first-year data (2019, methodology): “As a further check, we test their impact using an extreme model, the AGN feedback model by Harnois-Déraps et al. (2015) that is based on the cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of Schaye et al. (2010); van Daalen et al. (2011) (OverWhelming Large Simulations (OWLS)).”
The BAHAMAS project: Calibrated hydrodynamical simulations for large-scale structure cosmology (2016, background): “Note that the extent of the effect is not simply that some fraction of the baryons are removed; there is also a corresponding large-scale expansion (or ‘back reaction’) of the dark matter and a slowing of the accretion rate of new matter (e.g., van Daalen et al. 2011; Sawala et al. 2013).”
CFHTLenS: the relation between galaxy dark matter haloes and baryons from weak gravitational lensing (2013, background): “The influence of feedback on the gas distribution in galaxies is a complicated issue which may also affect our results, as discussed in van Daalen et al. (2011) and Semboloni et al. (2011), but it is an effect which we do not attempt to model here.”
Neutral hydrogen in galaxy haloes at the peak of the cosmic star formation history (2014, methodology): “…stellar feedback in very large volume cosmological simulations, which are ultimately necessary to realize the promise of percent-level cosmology (e.g., van Daalen et al. 2011) and make full use of large galaxy surveys as will provided by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope2, EUCLID3 and WFIRST4.”
KiDS-450: cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing (2016, methodology): “Allowing these two parameters to vary when fitting data from the OWLS simulations results in a model that is accurate to ∼3 per cent down to k = 10 h Mpc−1 for all the feedback scenarios presented in van Daalen et al. (2011).”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: matter and galaxy clustering (2017, background): “…clustering results, it is interesting to examine the overall impact of baryonic physics on the clustering of matter, which is arguably one of the most interesting effects that can be studied with hydrodynamic simulations, as highlighted first by van Daalen et al. (2011) and Semboloni et al. (2011).”
CFHTLenS revisited: assessing concordance with Planck including astrophysical systematics (2016, methodology): “There are additional difficulties in modelling the matter power spectrum due to baryonic physics coming from star formation, radiative cooling, and feedback processes (e.g. White 2004; Zhan & Knox 2004; Rudd, Zentner & Kravtsov 2008; van Daalen et al. 2011).”
KiDS+VIKING-450: Cosmic shear tomography with optical and infrared data (2018, methodology): “These limits are chosen such that on small scales the contribution from baryon feedback in the OWLS-AGN (van Daalen et al. 2011) model is less than ∼20% to the overall signal and on large scales the constant c-term (see Sect.”