Abundance and Clustering of C IV Absorption Systems in the SCDM, LCDM and CHDM Models

Abstract

We have developed a method for calculating the two-point correlation function of nonlinearly evolved mass and collapsed halos in the Press-Schechter formalism. The nonlinear gravitational interaction is treated as the sum of various individual spherical top-hat clustering. Because no collapsed halo of mass M can exist in initial regions (or top-hat spheres) of mass less than M, the bias that massive halos have stronger correlation than the background mass can be naturally introduced. We apply this method to derive constraints on popular dark-matter models from the spatial number density and the correlation function of C IV absorption systems in QSO spectra. Considering C IV systems should behosted by collapsed halos, one can obtain an upper limit to the threshold mass of the collapsed halos by requiring their number density to be larger than that of observed C IV systems. On the other hand, in order to explain the observed clustering of C IV systems, a lower limit to the threshold mass will be set for the hosting halos. The cold dark matter model, the Lamda CDM model and the cold-plus-hot dark matter model are tested using the C IV observations.