Measuring the growth of structure by matching dark matter haloes to galaxies with VIPERS and SDSS

We test the history of structure formation from redshift 1 to today by matching galaxies from the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS) and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with dark matter haloes in the MultiDark, Small MultiDark Planck (SMDPL), N-body simulation. We first show that the standard subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) recipe implemented with MultiDark fits the clustering of galaxies well both at redshift 0 for SDSS and at redshift 1 for VIPERS. This is an important validation of the SHAM model at high redshift. We then remap the simulation time steps to test alternative growth histories and infer the growth index γ = 0.6 ± 0.3. This analysis demonstrates the power of using N-body simulations to forward model galaxy surveys for cosmological inference. The data products and code necessary to reproduce the results of this analysis are available online (https://github.com/darklight-cosmology/vipers-sham).