Populating dark matter haloes with galaxies: comparing the 2dFGRS with mock galaxy redshift surveys

Abstract

In two recent papers, we developed a powerful technique to link the distribution of galaxies to that of dark matter haloes by considering halo occupation numbers as function of galaxy luminosity and type. In this paper we use these distribution functions to populate dark matter haloes in high-resolution N-body simulations of the standard LCDM cosmogony with Omega_m=0.3 and sigma_8=0.9. Stacking simulation boxes of 100 Mpc/h and 300 Mpc/h with 512^3 CDM particles each we construct Mock Galaxy Redshift Surveys out to a redshift of z=0.2. We use these mock surveys to investigate various clustering statistics. The projected correlation functions for galaxies with different luminosities and types match the observations well on scales larger than about 3 Mpc/h. On smaller scales, however, the model overpredicts the clustering power by about a factor two. Furthermore, the model predicts pairwise velocity dispersions (PVD) that are about 400 km/s too high at projected pair separations of ~1 Mpc/h. A strong velocity bias in massive haloes can reduce the predicted PVD to the observed level, but does not help to resolve the over-prediction of clustering power on small scales. Consistent results can be obtained within the standard LCDM model only when the mass-to-light ratio of clusters is almost twice the observed value. Alternatively, a LCDM model with sigma_8=0.75 can also reproduce the observational results.