Measuring galaxy abundance and clustering at high redshift from incomplete spectroscopic data: Tests on mock catalogs

Abstract

The number density and correlation function of galaxies are two key quantities to characterize the distribution of the observed galaxy population. High-$z$ spectroscopic surveys, which usually involve complex target selection and are incomplete in redshift sampling, present both opportunities and challenges to measure these quantities reliably in the high-$z$ Universe. Using realistic mock catalogs we show that target selection and redshift incompleteness can lead to significantly biased results, especially due to the flux limit selection criteria. We develop a new method to correct the flux limit effect, using information provided by the parent photometric data from which the spectroscopic sample is constructed. Our tests using realistic mock samples show that the method is able to reproduce the true stellar mass function and correlation function reliably. Mock catalogs are constructed for the existing zCOSMOS and VIPERS surveys, as well as for the forthcoming PFS galaxy evolution survey. The same set of mock samples are used to quantify the total variance expected for different sample sizes. We find that the total variance decreases very slowly when the survey area reaches about 4 deg${}^2$ for the abundance and about 8 deg${}^2$ for the clustering, indicating that the cosmic variance is no longer the dominant source of error for PFS-like surveys. We also quantify improvements expected in the PFS-like galaxy survey relative to zCOSMOS and VIPERS surveys.

The paper is significantly revised and the flux limit effect is emphasized. The method to correct the flux limit effect on clustering measurement is also improved. 24 pages, 15 figures, and this version is accepted by ApJ

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