Second Moment of Halo Occupation Number

Abstract

The halo approach to large scale structure provides a physically motivated model to understand clustering properties of galaxies. An important aspect of the halo model involves a description on how galaxies populate dark matter halos or what is now called the halo occupation distribution. We discuss a way in which clustering information, especially in the non-linear regime, can be used to determine moments of this halo occupation number. We invert the non-linear part of the real space power spectrum from the PSCz survey to determine the second moment of the halo occupation distribution in a model independent manner. The precise measurement of higher order correlations can eventually be used to determine successive higher order moments of this distribution.