The Concentration Dependence of the Galaxy-Halo Connection: Modeling Assembly Bias with Abundance Matching

doi:10.3847/1538-4357/834/1/37

Authors

Lehmann, Benjamin V.;

RefereedArticle

Abstract

Empirical methods for connecting galaxies to their dark matter halos have become essential for interpreting measurements of the spatial statistics of galaxies. In this work, we present a novel approach for parameterizing the degree of concentration dependence in the abundance matching method. This new parameterization provides a smooth interpolation between two commonly used matching proxies: the peak halo mass and the peak halo maximal circular velocity. This parameterization controls the amount of dependence of galaxy luminosity on halo concentration at a fixed halo mass. Effectively this interpolation scheme enables abundance matching models to have adjustable assembly bias in the resulting galaxy catalogs. With the new 400 {Mpc} {h}^-1 DarkSky Simulation, whose larger volume provides lower sample variance, we further show that low-redshift two-point clustering and satellite fraction measurements from SDSS can already provide a joint constraint on this concentration dependence and the scatter within the abundance matching framework.