Voronoi volume function: a new probe of cosmology and galaxy evolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT We study the Voronoi volume function (VVF) – the distribution of cell volumes (or inverse local number density) in the Voronoi tessellation of any set of cosmological tracers (galaxies/haloes). We show that the shape of the VVF of biased tracers responds sensitively to physical properties such as halo mass, large-scale environment, substructure, and redshift-space effects, making this a hitherto unexplored probe of both primordial cosmology and galaxy evolution. Using convenient summary statistics – the width, median, and a low percentile of the VVF as functions of average tracer number density – we explore these effects for tracer populations in a suite of N-body simulations of a range of dark matter models. Our summary statistics sensitively probe primordial features such as small-scale oscillations in the initial matter power spectrum (as arise in models involving collisional effects in the dark sector), while being largely insensitive to a truncation of initial power (as in warm dark matter models). For vanilla cold dark matter (CDM) cosmologies, the summary statistics display strong evolution and redshift-space effects, and are also sensitive to cosmological parameter values for realistic tracer samples. Comparing the VVF of galaxies in the Galaxies & Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey with that of abundance-matched CDM (sub)haloes tentatively reveals environmental effects in GAMA beyond halo mass (modulo unmodelled satellite properties). Our exploratory analysis thus paves the way for using the VVF as a new probe of galaxy evolution physics as well as the nature of dark matter and dark energy.