The environment of barred galaxies revisited
  We present a study of the environment of barred galaxies using galaxies drawn
from the SDSS. We use several different statistics to quantify the environment:
the projected two-point cross-correlation function, the background-subtracted
number count of neighbor galaxies, the overdensity of the local environment,
the membership of our galaxies to galaxy groups to segregate central and
satellite systems, and for central galaxies we estimate the stellar to halo
mass ratio (M$_{\mathrm{*}}/$M$_{\mathrm{h}}$) . When we split our sample into
early- and late-type galaxies, we see a weak but significant trend for
early-type galaxies with a bar to be more strongly clustered on scales from a
few 100 kpc to 1 Mpc when compared to unbarred early-type galaxies. This
indicates that the presence of a bar in early-type galaxies depends on the
location within their host dark matter halos. This is confirmed by the group
catalog in the sense that for early-types, the fraction of central galaxies is
smaller if they have a bar. For late-type galaxies, we find fewer neighbors
within $\sim50$ kpc around the barred galaxies when compared to unbarred
galaxies from the control sample, suggesting that tidal forces from close
companions suppress the formation/growth of bars. For central late-type
galaxies, bars are more common on galaxies with high
M$_{\mathrm{*}}/$M$_{\mathrm{h}}$ values, as expected from early theoretical
works which showed that systems with massive dark matter halos are more stable
against bar instabilities. Finally, we find no obvious correlation between
overdensity and the bars in our sample, showing that galactic bars are not
obviously linked to the large-scale structure of the universe.
