Nonlinearities in modified gravity cosmology. II. Impacts of modified gravity on the halo properties

The statistics of dark matter halos is an essential component of understanding the nonlinear evolution in modified gravity cosmology. Based on a series of modified gravity N-body simulations, we investigate the halo mass function, concentration, and bias. We model the impact of modified gravity by a single parameter xi, which determines the enhancement of particle acceleration with respect to general relativity (GR), given the identical mass distribution (xi = 1 in GR). We select snapshot redshifts such that the linear matter power spectra of different gravity models are identical, in order to isolate the impact of gravity beyond modifying the linear growth rate. At the baseline redshift corresponding to z(S) = 1.2 in the standard Lambda CDM, for a 10% deviation from GR (vertical bar xi - 1 vertical bar = 0.1), the measured halo mass function can differ by about 5%-10%, the halo concentration by about 10%-20%, while the halo bias differs significantly less. These results demonstrate that the halo mass function and/or the halo concentration are sensitive to the nature of gravity and may be used to make interesting constraints along this line. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.87.023521