On the Dynamical Origin of Bias in Clusters of Galaxies

We study the joint effect of tidal torques and dynamical friction on the collapse of density peaks solving numerically the equations of motion of a shell of barionic matter falling into the central regions of a cluster of galaxies. We calculate the evolution of the expansion parameter, a(t), of the perturbation using a coefficient of dynamical friction eta_{cl} obtained from a clustered system and taking into account the gravitational interaction of the quadrupole moment of t...

The statistics of peaks of the initial, Gaussian density field can be used to interpret the abundance and clustering of massive dark matter haloes. I discuss some recent theoretical results related to their clustering and its redshift evolution. Predictions from the peak model are qualitatively consistent with measurements of the linear bias of high mass haloes, which also show some evidence for a dependence on the halo mass M at fixed peak height. The peak approach also pred...

We study the effect of tidal torques on the collapse of density peaks through the equations of motion of a shell of barionic matter falling into the central regions of a cluster of galaxies. We calculate the time of collapse of the perturbation taking into account the gravitational interaction of the quadrupole moment of the system with the tidal field of the matter of the neighbouring proto-clusters. We show that within high-density environments, such as rich clusters of gal...

Clusters of galaxies, being dark matter dominated, have long been and still are the ideal cosmological targets to study the nature of dark matter. Constraints on the nature of dark matter comes in particular from the observational determination of the distribution of total and baryonic mass in clusters, by comparison with results from cosmological numerical simulations. I present here past and recent results on this research topic.

We investigate the origin of halo assembly bias, the dependence of halo clustering on assembly history. We relate halo assembly to peak properties measured in the Lagrangian space of the initial linear Gaussian random density field, and show how these same Lagrangian properties determine large-scale bias. We focus on the two regimes where assembly bias has been observed to be significant: at masses very large and very small compared to the nonlinear mass scale. At high masses...

The abundance and internal characteristics of rich clusters of galaxies can provide useful constraints on models of large--scale structure formation. This article will review some recent three dimensional, multi--fluid simulations of cluster dynamics and discuss their impact on issues raised from optical and X-ray observations of clusters. In `bottom--up' formation scenarios (such as the ubiquitous cold dark matter model), galaxies form before rich clusters; hence, cluster fo...

I outline the connections between some of the most widely used statistical measures of galaxy clustering and the fundamental issues in the theory of structure formation. I devote particular attention to the problem of biasing, i.e. to a possible difference between the distribution of galaxies and the distribution of mass. Using numerical experiments, I show that a local morphology-density relation leads to different slopes and amplitudes for the correlation functions of diffe...

We have used a combination of high resolution cosmological N-body simulations and semi-analytic modelling of galaxy formation to investigate the processes that determine the spatial distribution of galaxies in cold dark matter (CDM) models. The galaxy distribution depends sensitively on the efficiency with which galaxies form in halos of different mass. In small mass halos, galaxy formation is inhibited by the reheating of cooled gas by feedback processes, whereas in large ma...

With the advent of wide-field cosmological surveys, we are approaching samples of hundreds of thousands of galaxy clusters. While such large numbers will help reduce statistical uncertainties, the control of systematics in cluster masses becomes ever more crucial. Here we examine the effects of an important source of systematic uncertainty in galaxy-based cluster mass estimation techniques: the presence of significant dynamical substructure. Dynamical substructure manifests a...

Recent observations show a large concentration of galaxies at high redshift. At first sight strong clustering of galaxies at high redshifts seems to be in contradiction with the models of structure formation. In this paper we show that such structures are a manifestation of the strong clustering of rare peaks in the density field. We compute the frequency of occurrence of such large concentrations of galaxies in some models of structure formation.