Revisiting the effects of baryon physics on small-scale redshift space distortions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Redshift space distortions are an important probe of the growth of large-scale structure and for constraining cosmological parameters in general. As galaxy redshift surveys approach per cent level precision in their observations of the two point clustering statistics, it is timely to review what effects baryons and associated processes such as feedback may have on small-scale clustering in redshift space. Contrary to previous studies in the literature, we show using the large-volume Bahamas hydrodynamic simulations that the effect of baryons can be as much as 1 per cent in the $k \sim 0.1\, h\,$Mpc$^{-1}$ range for the monopole and 5 per cent for quadrupole, and that this could rise to as much as 10 per cent at $k \sim 10 \, h\,$Mpc$^{-1}$ in both measurements. For the halo power spectra, this difference can be as much 3-4 per cent in the monopole on scales of $0.05 \lt k \lt 0.3 \, h\,$Mpc$^{-1}$ for 10$^{13}\, h^{-1}$ M$_{\odot }$ haloes. We find that these deviations can be mitigated to the sub- per cent level in the both the monopole and quadrupole up to $k\sim 0.3\, h$ Mpc$^{-1}$ if the baryon corrected halo masses are used to calculate the redshift space power spectra. Finally, we use the cosmo-OWLS simulation suite to explore the changes in the redshift space power spectra with different feedback prescriptions, finding that there is a maximum of 15–20 per cent difference between the redshift space monopole and quadrupole with and without baryons at $k \sim 1\!-\!2\, h\,$Mpc$^{-1}$ within these models.