Published December 1, 2019 | Version v1
Journal article

The bias of cosmic voids in the presence of massive neutrinos

  • 1. Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Fakultät für Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Scheinerstr. 1, D-81679 München (Germany)
  • 2. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, 4 Ivy Lane, Princeton, NJ 08544 (United States)
  • 3. INAF—Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica Milano, via Alfonso Corti 12, I-20133 Milano (Italy)

Description

Cosmic voids offer an extraordinary opportunity to study the effects of massive neutrinos on cosmological scales. Because they are freely streaming, neutrinos can penetrate the interior of voids more easily than cold dark matter or baryons, which makes their relative contribution to the mass budget in voids much higher than elsewhere in the Universe. In simulations it has recently been shown how various characteristics of voids in the matter distribution are affected by neutrinos, such as their abundance, density profiles, dynamics, and clustering properties. However, the tracers used to identify voids in observations (e.g., galaxies or halos) are affected by neutrinos as well, and isolating the unique neutrino signatures inherent to voids becomes more difficult. In this paper we make use of the DEMNUni suite of simulations to investigate the clustering bias of voids in Fourier space as a function of their core density and compensation. We find a clear dependence on the sum of neutrino masses that remains significant even for void statistics extracted from halos. In particular, we observe that the amplitude of the linear void bias increases with neutrino mass for voids defined in dark matter, whereas this trend gets reversed and slightly attenuated when measuring the relative void-halo bias using voids identified in the halo distribution. Finally, we argue how the original behaviour can be restored when considering observations of the total matter distribution (e.g. via weak lensing), and comment on scale-dependent effects in the void bias that may provide additional information on neutrinos in the future.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2019/12/055

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Journal Volume
2019
Journal Issue
12
Journal Page Range
p. 055
ISSN
1475-7516

INIS

Country of Publication
United Kingdom
Country of Input or Organization
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
INIS RN
51065192
Subject category
S79: ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY;
Descriptors DEI
BARYONS; COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION; DENSITY; DISTRIBUTION; GALAXIES; GRAVITATIONAL LENSES; MASS; NEUTRINOS; NONLUMINOUS MATTER; SPACE; STATISTICS; UNIVERSE
Descriptors DEC
ELEMENTARY PARTICLES; FERMIONS; HADRONS; LENSES; LEPTONS; MASSLESS PARTICLES; MATHEMATICS; MATTER; PHYSICAL PROPERTIES; SIMULATION