Cosmology with massive neutrinos II: on the universality of the halo mass function and bias

5 Nov 2013  ·  E. Castorina, E. Sefusatti, R. K. Sheth, F. Villaescusa-Navarro, M. Viel ·

We use a large suite of N-body simulations to study departures from universality in halo abundances and clustering in cosmologies with non-vanishing neutrino masses. To this end, we study how the halo mass function and halo bias factors depend on the scaling variable $\sigma^2(M,z)$, the variance of the initial matter fluctuation field, rather than on halo mass $M$ and redshift $z$ themselves. We show that using the variance of the cold dark matter rather than the total mass field, i.e., $\sigma^2_{cdm}(M,z)$ rather than $\sigma^2_{m}(M,z)$, yields more universal results. Analysis of halo bias yields similar conclusions: When large-scale halo bias is defined with respect to the cold dark matter power spectrum, the result is both more universal, and less scale- or $k$-dependent. These results are used extensively in Papers I and III of this series.

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