Muscle-ups: improved approximations of the matter field with the extended Press–Schechter formalism and Lagrangian perturbation theory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Lagrangian algorithms to simulate the evolution of cold dark matter (CDM) are invaluable tools to generate large suites of mock halo catalogues. In this paper, we first show that the main limitation of current semi-analytical schemes to simulate the displacement of CDM is their inability to model the evolution of overdensities in the initial density field, a limit that can be circumvented by detecting halo particles in the initial conditions. We thus propose ‘MUltiscale Spherical Collapse Lagrangian Evolution Using Press–Schechter’ (muscle-ups), a new scheme that reproduces the results from Lagrangian perturbation theory on large scales, while improving the modelling of overdensities on small scales. In muscle-ups, we adapt the extended Press and Schechter formalism to Lagrangian algorithms of the displacement field. For regions exceeding a collapse threshold in the density smoothed at a radius R, we consider all particles within a radius R collapsed. Exploiting a multiscale smoothing of the initial density, we build a halo catalogue on the fly by optimizing the selection of halo candidates. This allows us to generate a density field with a halo mass function that matches one measured in N-body simulations. We further explicitly gather particles in each halo together in a profile, providing a numerical, Lagrangian-based implementation of the halo model. Compared to previous semi-analytical Lagrangian methods, we find that muscle-ups improves the recovery of the statistics of the density field at the level of the probability density function, the power spectrum, and the cross-correlation with the N-body result.