Dive in the cosmic web: voids with Delaunay triangulation from discrete matter tracer distributions

Abstract

We present a novel parameter-free cosmological void finder (dive, Delaunay TrIangulation Void findEr) based on Delaunay Triangulation (DT), which efficiently computes the empty spheres constrained by a discrete set of tracers. We define the spheres as DT voids, and describe their properties, including a universal density profile together with an intrinsic scatter. We apply this technique on 100 halo catalogues with volumes of 2.5 h−1Gpc side each, with a bias and number density similar to the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey CMASS luminous red galaxies, performed with the patchy code. Our results show that there are two main species of DT voids, which can be characterized by the radius: they have different responses to halo redshift space distortions, to number density of tracers, and reside in different dark matter environments. Based on dynamical arguments using the tidal field tensor, we demonstrate that large DT voids are hosted in expanding regions, whereas the haloes used to construct them reside in collapsing ones. Our approach is therefore able to efficiently determine the troughs of the density field from galaxy surveys, and can be used to study their clustering. We further study the power spectra of DT voids, and find that the bias of the two populations are different, demonstrating that the small DT voids are essentially tracers of groups of haloes.