Accurate Determination of Halo Velocity Bias in Simulations and Its Cosmological Implications

Abstract A long-standing issue in peculiar velocity cosmology is whether the halo/galaxy velocity bias b v = 1 at large scale. The resolution of this important issue must resort to high-precision cosmological simulations. However, this is hampered by another long-standing “sampling artifact” problem in volume-weighted velocity measurement. We circumvent this problem with a hybrid approach. We first measure the statistics free of sampling artifacts, then link them to volume-weighted statistics in theory, and finally solve for the velocity bias. b v (determined by our method) is not only free of sampling artifacts but also free of cosmic variance. We apply this method to a ΛCDM N -body simulation of 3072 3 particles and box size. For the first time, we determine the halo velocity bias to 0.1%–1% accuracy. Our major findings are as follows: (1) at . The deviation from unity ( ) increases with k . Depending on halo mass and redshift, it may reach at and at . The discovered has a statistically significant impact on the structure growth rate measurement by spectroscopic redshift surveys, including DESI, Euclid, and SKA. (2) Both the sign and the amplitude of b v − 1 depend on mass and redshift. These results disagree with the peak model prediction in that b v has much weaker deviation from unity, varies with redshift, and can be bigger than unity. (3) Most of the mass and redshift dependences can be compressed into a single dependence on the halo density bias. Based on this finding, we provide an approximate two-parameter fitting formula.