Power spectrum of halo intrinsic alignments in simulations

Abstract

ABSTRACT We use a suite of N-body simulations to study intrinsic alignments (IA) of halo shapes with the surrounding large-scale structure in the ΛCDM model. For this purpose, we develop a novel method to measure multipole moments of the three-dimensional power spectrum of the E-mode field of halo shapes with the matter/halo distribution, $P_{\delta E}^{(\ell)}(k)$ (or $P^{(\ell)}_{{\rm h}E}$), and those of the auto-power spectrum of the E-mode, $P^{(\ell)}_{EE}(k)$, based on the E/B-mode decomposition. The IA power spectra have non-vanishing amplitudes over the linear to non-linear scales, and the large-scale amplitudes at k ≲ 0.1 h−1 Mpc are related to the matter power spectrum via a constant coefficient (AIA), similar to the linear bias parameter of galaxy or halo density field. We find that the cross- and auto-power spectra PδE and PEE at non-linear scales, k ≳ 0.1 h−1 Mpc, show different k-dependences relative to the matter power spectrum, suggesting a violation of the non-linear alignment model commonly used to model contaminations of cosmic shear signals. The IA power spectra exhibit baryon acoustic oscillations, and vary with halo samples of different masses, redshifts, and cosmological parameters (Ωm, S8). The cumulative signal-to-noise ratio for the IA power spectra is about 60 per cent of that for the halo density power spectrum, where the super-sample covariance is found to give a significant contribution to the total covariance. Thus our results demonstrate that the IA power spectra of galaxy shapes, measured from imaging and spectroscopic surveys for an overlapping area of the sky, can be used to probe the underlying matter power spectrum, the primordial curvature perturbations, and cosmological parameters, in addition to the standard galaxy density power spectrum.