Triaxial haloes, intrinsic alignments and the dark matter power spectrum

Abstract

(Abridged) We develop the halo model of large-scale structure to include triaxial dark matter haloes and their intrinsic alignments. As a direct application we derive general expressions for the power spectrum. This we calculate for two different triaxial density profiles. The first is a toy-model that allows us to isolate the dependence of clustering on halo shape alone and the second is the more realistic model of Jing & Suto (2002). In both cases, we find that the effects of triaxiality are manifest as a suppression of power at the level of ~5% on scales k~1-10 h/Mpc. When considered by mass, we find that for the first model the power is suppressed and that this is more significant for high mass haloes. For the Jing & Suto model, we find a similar suppression on large scales, but followed by a sharp amplification on small scales at the level of ~10-15%, for the highest mass haloes. One of the important features of our formalism is that it allows for the self-consistent inclusion of the intrinsic alignments of haloes. The alignments are specified through the correlation function of halo seeds. We develop a useful toy model for this and make estimates of the alignment contribution to the power spectrum. Further, through consideration of the case where all haloes are perfectly aligned, we calculate the maximum contribution to the clustering and find the hard limit of <10%.