Mass-Dependent Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Signal and Halo Bias
  We characterize the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) feature in halo
two-point statistics using N-body simulations. We find that nonlinear damping
of the BAO signal is less severe for halos in the mass range we investigate
than for dark matter. The amount of damping depends weakly on the halo mass.
The correlation functions show a mass-dependent drop of the halo clustering
bias below roughly 90 Mpc/h, which coincides with the scale of the BAO trough.
The drop of bias is 4% for halos with mass M>10^{14} Msun/h and reduces to
roughly 2% for halos with mass M>10^{13} Msun/h. In contrast, halo biases in
simulations without BAO change more smoothly around 90 Mpc/h. In Fourier space,
the bias of M>10^{14} Msun/h halos decreases smoothly by 11% from wavenumber k
= 0.012 h/Mpc to 0.2 h/Mpc, whereas that of M>10^{13} Msun/h halos decreases by
less than 4% over the same range. By comparing the halo biases in pairs of
otherwise identical simulations, one with and the other without BAO, we also
observe a modulation of the halo bias. These results suggest that precise
calibrations of the mass-dependent BAO signal and scale-dependent bias on large
scales would be needed for interpreting precise measurements of the two-point
statistics of clusters or massive galaxies in the future.
