2015, MNRAS The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Modeling the clustering and halo occupation distribution of BOSS-CMASS galaxies in the Final Data Release

We present a study of the clustering and halo occupation distribution of BOSS CMASS galaxies in the redshift range 0.43 < z < 0.7 drawn from the Final SDSS-III Data Release. We compare the BOSS results with the predictions of a halo abundance matching (HAM) clustering model that assigns galaxies to dark matter halos selected from the large BigMultiDark N-body simulation of a flat Lambda-CDM Planck cosmology. We compare the observational data with the simulated ones on a light-cone constructed from 20 subsequent outputs of the simulation... 

 

 

2015, MNRAS A Steep Slope and Small Scatter for the High-Mass End of the L-σ Relation at z∼0.55

We measure the intrinsic relation between velocity dispersion (σ) and luminosity (L) for massive, luminous red galaxies (LRGs) at redshift z∼0.55. We achieve unprecedented precision by using a sample of 600,000 galaxies with spectra from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), covering a range of stellar masses M∗≳10^11 M⊙. We deconvolve the effects of photometric errors, limited spectroscopic signal-to-noise ratio, and red--blue galaxy confusion using a novel hierarchical Bayesian formalism that is generally applicable to any combination of photometric and spectroscopic observables. For an L-σ relation of the form L∝σ^β, we find β=7.8±1.1 for σ corrected to the effective radius, and a very small intrinsic scatter of s=0.047±0.004 in log10 σ at fixed L. No significant redshift evolution is found for these parameters...

 

 

2015, MNRAS The High-Mass Red-Sequence Luminosity Function from SDSS-III/BOSS: completeness, bimodality and evolution  

We measure the high-mass end of the 0.55i-band Red Sequence Luminosity Function (RS LF) and its redshift evolution within the redshift range 0.52 < z < 0.65, from the DR10 BOSS CMASS spectroscopic sample, which comprises ∼ 600,000 galaxies. We have developed an analytical method based on an unbinned maximum likelihood approach for deconvolving the observed CMASS distribution in colour-colour- magnitude space from photometric errors and accounting for selection effects. This procedure requires modeling the covariance matrix for the i-band magnitude, g-r colour and r-i colour using Stripe 82 multi-epoch data. The error-deconvolved intrinsic RS distribution is consistent with a single point in the colour-colour plane at fixed mag- nitude, for a narrow redshift slice...