First tomographic measurements of the angular clustering and bias of photometric quasars from S-PLUS

Abstract

We investigate the quasar clustering in the QuCatS photometric catalog, constructed from the fourth data release of the Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey (S-PLUS). The quasar sample for this study consists of $23,402$ quasars, spanning the redshift interval $1.1 \leq z_{\rm phot} \leq 2.6$, which we divided into four bins for our tomographic analyses. In each bin, we measured the two-point angular correlation function and compared it with theoretical predictions for the clustering of dark matter in the flat-$Λ$CDM cosmological model. We then estimate the effective linear bias in each bin that best fits the data, obtaining $b_{Q}(z_{\rm eff}=1.26)=2.17^{+0.30}_{-0.35}$, $b_{Q}(z_{\rm eff}=1.63)=2.67^{+0.36}_{-0.42}$, $b_{Q}(z_{\rm eff}=2.04)=3.29^{+0.52}_{-0.62}$, and $b_{Q}(z_{\rm eff}=2.38)=4.05^{+0.71}_{-0.86}$. These measurements are consistent with previous analyses in the literature. Moreover, the evolution of the bias agrees well with the $b(z)$ parameterization proposed by \cite{laurent2017}. Our measurements constitute the first cosmological study of the tomographic clustering of photometric quasars provided by the S-PLUS dataset, contributing to the mapping of the evolution of linear bias and paving the way for future analyses of data releases with larger datasets. In addition, our study also serves as a consistency test for the calibration procedure of the photometric redshift probability distributions of the quasars in the QuCatS catalog.