The massive end of the luminosity and stellar mass functions and
  clustering from CMASS to SDSS: Evidence for and against passive evolution
  We describe the luminosity function, based on Sersic fits to the light
profiles, of CMASS galaxies at z ~ 0.55. Compared to previous estimates, our
Sersic-based reductions imply more luminous, massive galaxies, consistent with
the effects of Sersic- rather than Petrosian or de Vaucouleur-based photometry
on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) main galaxy sample at z ~ 0.1. This
implies a significant revision of the high mass end of the correlation between
stellar and halo mass. Inferences about the evolution of the luminosity and
stellar mass functions depend strongly on the assumed, and uncertain, k+e
corrections. In turn, these depend on the assumed age of the population.
Applying k+e corrections taken from fitting the models of Maraston et al.
(2009) to the colors of both SDSS and CMASS galaxies, the evolution of the
luminosity and stellar mass functions appears impressively passive, provided
that the fits are required to return old ages. However, when matched in
comoving number- or luminosity-density, the SDSS galaxies are less strongly
clustered compared to their counterparts in CMASS. This rules out the passive
evolution scenario, and, indeed, any minor merger scenarios which preserve the
rank ordering in stellar mass of the population. Potential incompletenesses in
the CMASS sample would further enhance this mismatch. Our analysis highlights
the virtue of combining clustering measurements with number counts.
