The Aemulus Project IV: Emulating Halo Bias

Abstract

Models of the spatial distribution of dark matter halos must achieve new levels of precision and accuracy in order to satisfy the requirements of upcoming experiments. In this work, we present a halo bias emulator for modeling the clustering of halos on large scales. It incorporates the cosmological dependence of the bias beyond the mapping of halo mass to peak height. The emulator makes substantial improvements in accuracy compared to the widely used Tinker et al. (2010) model. Halos in this work are defined using an overdensity criteria of 200 relative to the mean background density. Halo catalogs are produced for 40 N-body simulations as part of the Aemulus project at snapshots from z=3 to z=0. The emulator is trained over the mass range $6\times10^{12}-7\times10^{15}\ h^{-1}M_{\odot}$. Using an additional suite of 35 simulations, we determine that the precision of the emulator is redshift dependent, achieving sub-percent levels for a majority of the redshift range. Two additional simulation suites are used to test the ability of the emulator to extrapolate to higher and lower masses. Our high-resolution simulation suite is used to develop an extrapolation scheme in which the emulator asymptotes to the Tinker et al. (2010) model at low mass, achieving ~3% accuracy down to $10^{11}\ h^{-1}M_{\odot}$. Finally, we present a method to propagate emulator modeling uncertainty into an error budget. Our emulator is made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/AemulusProject/bias_emulator}.