Peaks in the cosmological density field: sensitivity to initial power spectrum, redshift distortions and galaxy halo occupation

We investigate the number density of maxima in the cosmological galaxy density field smoothed with a filter as a probe of clustering. In previous work it has been shown that this statistic is closely related to the slope of the linear power spectrum, even when the directly measured power spectrum is non-linear. In the present paper we investigate the sensitivity of the peak number density to various models with differing power spectra, including rolling index models, cosmologies with massive neutrinos and different baryon densities. We find that rolling index models which have given an improved fit to CMB/LSS (cosmic microwave background/large scale structure) data yield a ∼10 per cent difference in peak density compared to the scale invariant case. Models with 0.3 eV neutrinos have effects of similar magnitude and it should be possible to constrain them with data from current galaxy redshift surveys. Baryon oscillations in the power spectrum also give rise to distinctive features in the peak density. These are preserved without modification when measured from the peak density in fully non-linear N -body simulations. Using the simulations, we also investigate how the peak density is modified in the presence of redshift distortions. Redshift distortions cause a suppression of the number of peaks, largely due to fingers of God overlapping in redshift space. We find that this effect can be modelled by using a modification of the input power spectrum. We also study the results when the simulation density field is traced by galaxies obtained by populating haloes with a halo occupation distribution consistent with observations. The peak number density is consistent with that in the dark matter for filter scales  >4  h ⁻¹ Mpc  , for which we find good agreement with the linear theory predictions. In a companion paper we analyse data from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.