Yipeng Jing

The Stellar-to-halo Mass Relation of Local Galaxies Segregates by Color

We derive the stellar-to-halo mass relations, SHMR, of local blue and red central galaxies separately, as well as the fraction of halos hosting blue/red central galaxies. We find that: 1) the SHMR of central galaxies is segregated by color, with blue centrals having a SHMR above the one of red centrals; at logMh~12, the Ms/Mh ratio of the blue centrals is ~0.05, which is ~1.7 times larger than the value of red centrals. 2) The intrinsic scatters of the SHMRs of red and blue centrals are ~0.14 and ~0.11dex, respectively. The intrinsic scatter of the average SHMR of all central galaxies changes from ~0.20dex to ~0.14dex in the 11.3<logMh<15 range. 3) The fraction of halos hosting blue centrals at Mh=1E11Msun is 87%, but at 2x1E12Msun decays to ~20%, approaching to a few per cents at higher masses. The characteristic mass at which this fraction is the same for blue and red galaxies is Mh~7x1E11Msun. Our results suggest that the SHMR of central galaxies at large masses is shaped by halo mass quenching (likely through shock virial heating and AGN feedback), but group richness also plays an important role: central galaxies living in less dense environments quenched their star formation later or did not quench it yet. At low masses, processes that delay star formation without invoking too strong supernova-driven outflows could explain the high Ms/Mh ratios of blue centrals as compared to those of the scarce red centrals.

THE DETECTION OF THE LARGE-SCALE ALIGNMENT OF MASSIVE GALAXIES AT z ∼ 0.6

We report on the detection of the alignment between galaxies and large-scale structure at z ~ 0.6 based on the CMASS galaxy sample from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopy Survey Data Release 9. We use two statistics to quantify the alignment signal: (1) the alignment two-point correlation function that probes the dependence of galaxy clustering at a given separation in redshift space on the projected angle (? p ) between the orientation of galaxies and the line connecting to other galaxies, and (2) the cos (2?)-statistic that estimates the average of cos (2? p ) for all correlated pairs at a given separation s. We find a significant alignment signal out to about 70 h ?1?Mpc in both statistics. Applications of the same statistics to dark matter halos of mass above 1012 h ?1 M ? in a large cosmological simulation show scale-dependent alignment signals similar to the observation, but with higher amplitudes at all scales probed. We show that this discrepancy may be partially explained by a misalignment angle between central galaxies and their host halos, though detailed modeling is needed in order to better understand the link between the orientations of galaxies and host halos. In addition, we find systematic trends of the alignment statistics with the stellar mass of the CMASS galaxies, in the sense that more massive galaxies are more strongly aligned with the large-scale structure.

ELUCID—EXPLORING THE LOCAL UNIVERSE WITH THE RECONSTRUCTED INITIAL DENSITY FIELD. I. HAMILTONIAN MARKOV CHAIN MONTE CARLO METHOD WITH PARTICLE MESH DYNAMICS

Simulating the evolution of the local universe is important for studying galaxies and the intergalactic medium in a way free of cosmic variance. Here we present a method to reconstruct the initial linear density field from an input nonlinear density field, employing the Hamiltonian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm combined with Particle-mesh (PM) dynamics. The HMC+PM method is applied to cosmological simulations, and the reconstructed linear density fields are then evolved to the present day with N-body simulations. These constrained simulations accurately reproduce both the amplitudes and phases of the input simulations at various z. Using a PM model with a grid cell size of 0.75 h(-1) Mpc and 40 time steps in the HMC can recover more than half of the phase information down to a scale k similar to 0.85 h Mpc(-1) at high z and to k similar to 3.4 h Mpc(-1) at z = 0, which represents a significant improvement over similar reconstruction models in the literature, and indicates that our model can reconstruct the formation histories of cosmic structures over a large dynamical range. Adopting PM models with higher spatial and temporal resolutions yields even better reconstructions, suggesting that our method is limited more by the availability of computer resource than by principle. Dynamic models of structure evolution adopted in many earlier investigations can induce non-Gaussianity in the reconstructed linear density field, which in turn can cause large systematic deviations in the predicted halo mass function. Such deviations are greatly reduced or absent in our reconstruction.

The Intrinsic Alignment of Dark Halo Substructures

We investigate the intrinsic alignments of dark halo substructures with their host halo major-axis orientations both analytically and numerically. Analytically, we derive the probability density distribution of the angles between the minor axes of the substructures and the major axes of their host halos from the physical principles, under the assumption that the substructure alignment on galaxy scales is a consequence of the tidal fields of the host halo gravitational potential. Numerically, we use a sample of four cluster-scale halos and their galaxy-scale substructures from recent high-resolution N-body simulations to measure the probability density distribution. We compare the numerical distribution with the analytic prediction, and find that the two results agree with each other very well. We conclude that our analytic model provides a quantitative physical explanation for the intrinsic alignment of dark halo substructures. We also discuss the possibility of differentiating our model from the anisotropic infall scenario by testing it against very large N-body simulations in the future.

ELUCID - Exploring the Local Universe with reConstructed Initial Density field III: Constrained Simulation in the SDSS Volume

A method we developed recently for the reconstruction of the initial density field in the nearby Universe is applied to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7. A high-resolution N-body constrained simulation (CS) of the reconstructed initial condition, with

Modelling the redshift-space three-point correlation function in SDSS-III

3072^3

BULK FLOW OF HALOS IN Lambda CDM SIMULATION

particles evolved in a 500 Mpc/h box, is carried out and analyzed in terms of the statistical properties of the final density field and its relation with the distribution of SDSS galaxies. We find that the statistical properties of the cosmic web and the halo populations are accurately reproduced in the CS. The galaxy density field is strongly correlated with the CS density field, with a bias that depend on both galaxy luminosity and color. Our further investigations show that the CS provides robust quantities describing the environments within which the observed galaxies and galaxy systems reside. Cosmic variance is greatly reduced in the CS so that the statistical uncertainties can be controlled effectively even for samples of small volumes.

Photometric Properties and Luminosity Function of Nearby Massive Early-type Galaxies

We present the measurements of the redshift-space three-point correlation function (3PCF) for z similar to 0.5 luminous red galaxies of the CMASS sample in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 11. The 3PCF measurements are interpreted within the halo occupation distribution framework using high-resolution N-body simulations, and the model successfully reproduces the 3PCF on scales larger than 1 h(-1) Mpc. As with the case for the redshift-space two-point correlation functions, we find that the redshift-space 3PCF measurements also favour the inclusion of galaxy velocity bias in the model. In particular, the central galaxy in a halo is on average in motion with respect to the core of the halo. We discuss the potential of the small-scale 3PCF to tighten the constraints on the relation between galaxies and dark matter haloes and on the phase-space distribution of galaxies.

Peculiar velocity decomposition, redshift space distortion and velocity reconstruction in redshift surveys. II. Dark matter velocity statistics

Analysis of the Pangu N-body simulation validates that the bulk flow of halos follows a Maxwellian distribution with variance that is consistent with the prediction of the linear theory of structure formation. We propose that the consistency between the observed bulk velocity and theories should be examined at the effective scale of the radius of a spherical top-hat window function yielding the same smoothed velocity variance in linear theory as the sample window function does. We compared some recently estimated bulk flows from observational samples with the prediction of the Lambda CDM model we used; some results deviate from expectation at a level of similar to 3 sigma, but the discrepancy is not as severe as previously claimed. We show that bulk flow is only weakly correlated with the dipole of the internal mass distribution, that the alignment angle between the mass dipole and the bulk flow has a broad distribution peaked at similar to 30 degrees-50 degrees, and also that the bulk flow shows little dependence on the mass of the halos used in the estimation. In a simulation of box size 1 h(-1) Gpc, for a cell of radius 100 h(-1) Mpc the maximal bulk velocity is >500 km s(-1); dipoles of the environmental mass outside the cell are not tightly aligned with the bulk flow, but are rather located randomly around it with separation angles similar to 20 degrees-40 degrees. In the fastest cell there is a slightly smaller number of low-mass halos; however, halos inside are clustered more strongly at scales greater than or similar to 20 h(-1) Mpc, which might be a significant feature since the correlation between bulk flow and halo clustering actually increases in significance beyond such scales.

The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: selecting emission line galaxies using the Fisher discriminant

We perform photometric analyses of a bright early-type galaxy sample with 2949 galaxies (M-r < -22.5 mag) in the redshift range of 0.05-0.15, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR7 with morphological classification from Galaxy Zoo 1. We measure the Petrosian and isophotal magnitudes, as well as the corresponding half-light radius for each galaxy. We find that for the brightest galaxies (M-r < -23 mag), our Petrosian magnitudes and isophotal magnitudes to 25 mag arcsec(-2) and 1% of the sky brightness are on average 0.16 mag, 0.20 mag, and 0.26 mag brighter than the SDSS Petrosian values, respectively. In the first case, the underestimations are caused by overestimations in the sky background by the SDSS PHOTO algorithm, while the latter two are also due to deeper photometry. Similarly, the typical half-light radii (r(50)) measured by the SDSS algorithm are smaller than our measurements. As a result, the bright end of the r-band luminosity function is found to decline more slowly than previous works. Our measured luminosity densities at the bright end are more than one order of magnitude higher than those of Blanton et al., and the stellar mass densities at M-* similar to 5 x 10(11) M-circle dot and M-* similar to 10(12) M-circle dot are a few tenths and a factor of a few higher than those of Bernardi et al. These results may significantly alleviate the tension in the assembly of massive galaxies between observations and predictions of the hierarchical structure formation model.