Calculation of the critical overdensity in the spherical-collapse approximation

Abstract

Critical overdensity ${\delta }_c$ is a key concept in estimating the number count of halos for different redshift and halo-mass bins, and therefore, it is a powerful tool to compare cosmological models to observations. There are currently two different prescriptions in the literature for its calculation, namely, the differential-radius and the constant-infinity methods. In this work we show that the latter yields precise results {\it only} if we are careful in the definition of the so-called numerical infinities. Although the subtleties we point out are crucial ingredients for an accurate determination of ${\delta }_c$ both in general relativity and in any other gravity theory, we focus on $f(R)$ modified-gravity models in the metric approach; in particular, we use the so-called large ($F=1/3$) and small-field ($F=0$) limits. For both of them, we calculate the relative errors (between our method and the others) in the critical density ${\delta }_c$, in the comoving number density of halos per logarithmic mass interval $n_{\ln M}$ and in the number of clusters at a given redshift in a given mass bin $N_{\mathrm{bin}}$, as functions of the redshift. We have also derived an analytical expression for the density contrast in the linear regime as a function of the collapse redshift $z_c$ and ${\Omega }_{m0}$ for any $F$.

11 pages, 6 figures, version accepted by Phys. Rev. D

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• On the implementation of the spherical collapse model for dark energy models
• Clustering dark energy and halo abundances