Paper detail

The Relative Abundance of Isolated Clusters as a Probe of Dark Energy

Those galaxy clusters which do not belong to the superclusters are referred to as the isolated clusters. Their relative abundance at a given epoch may be a powerful constraint of the dark energy equation of state since it depends strongly on how fast the structures grow on the largest scale in the Universe. We note that the mass function of the isolated clusters can be separately evaluated through the modification of the recently developed Corasaniti-Achitouv (CA) theory according to which the stochastic collapse barrier is quantified by two coefficients: the drifting average coefficient (β) and the diffusion coefficient (D_B). Regarding $β$ in the CA formalism as an adjustable parameter and assuming that the formation of isolated clusters corresponds to the case of D_B=0, we determine the mass function of the isolated clusters by fitting the numerical results from the MICE simulations to the modified CA formula. It is found that the best-fit value of beta changes with redshift and that the CA mass function with D_B=0 agrees very well with the numerical results at various redshifts. Defining the relative abundance of the isolated clusters, xi_I, as the ratio of the cumulative mass function of the isolated clusters to that of the non-isolated clusters at a given epoch, we finally show how sensitively xi_I changes with the dark energy equation of state. It is also discussed how xi_I can help to break the degeneracy between the dark energy equation of state and the other key cosmological parameters.