Pierre Laurent

Clustering of quasars in the First Year of the SDSS-IV eBOSS survey: Interpretation and halo occupation distribution

SRT is grateful for support from the Campus de Excelencia Internacional UAM/CSIC. SRT, JC, FP acknowledge support from the Spanish MICINN Consolider-Ingenio 2010 Programme under grant MultiDark CSD2009-00064 MINECO Severo Ochoa Award SEV-2012-0249 and grant AYA2014-60641-C2-1-P. GY acknowledges financial support from MINECO/FEDER (Spain) under research grants AYA2012-31101 and AYA201563810-P.

Clustering of quasars in SDSS-IV eBOSS : study of potential systematics and bias determination

We study the first year of the eBOSS quasar sample in the redshift range 0.9 < z < 2.2 which includes 68,772 homogeneously selected quasars. We show that the main source of systematics in the evaluation of the correlation function arises from inhomogeneities in the quasar target selection, particularly related to the extinction and depth of the imaging data used for targeting. We propose a weighting scheme that mitigates these systematics. We measure the quasar correlation function and provide the most accurate measurement to date of the quasar bias in this redshift range, b(Q) = 2.45 +/- 0.05 at (z) over bar = 1.55, together with its evolution with redshift. We use this information to determine the minimum mass of the halo hosting the quasars and the characteristic halo mass, which we find to be both independent of redshift within statistical error. Using a recently-measured quasar-luminosity-function we also determine the quasar duty cycle. The size of this first year sample is insufficient to detect any luminosity dependence to quasar clustering and this issue should be further studied with the final similar to 500,000 eBOSS quasar sample.