Halo Stochasticity from Exclusion and non-linear Clustering
  The clustering of galaxies in ongoing and upcoming galaxy surveys contains a
wealth of cosmological information, but extracting this information is a
non-trivial task since galaxies and their host haloes are stochastic tracers of
the matter density field. This stochasticity is usually modeled as Poisson shot
noise, which is constant as a function of wavenumber with amplitude given by
1/n, where n is the number density of galaxies. Here we use dark matter haloes
in N-body simulations to show evidence for deviations from this simple
behaviour and develop models that explain the behaviour of the large scale
stochasticity. First, haloes are extended, non-overlapping objects, i.e., their
correlation function needs to go to -1 on small scales. This leads to a
negative correction to the stochasticity relative to the Poisson value at low
wavenumber k, decreasing to zero for wavenumbers large compared to the inverse
exclusion scale. Second, haloes show a non-linear enhancement of clustering
outside the exclusion scale, leading to a positive stochasticity correction.
Both of these effects go to zero for high-k, making the stochasticity scale
dependent even for k<0.1 h/Mpc. We show that the corrections in the low-k
regime are the same in Eulerian and Lagrangian space, but that the transition
scale is pushed to smaller scales for haloes observed at present time, relative
to the initial conditions. These corrections vary with halo mass and redshift.
We also discuss simple applications of these effects to the galaxy samples with
non-vanishing satellite fraction, where the stochasticity can again deviate
strongly from the fiducial Poisson expectation. Overall these effects affect
the clustering of galaxies at a level of a few percent even on very large
scales and need to be modelled properly if we want to extract high precision
cosmological information from the upcoming galaxy surveys.
