Impact of assembly bias on clustering plus weak lensing cosmological analysis

Abstract: Analytical models of galaxy-halo connection such as the Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) model have been widely used over the past decades as a means to intensively test perturbative models on quasi-linear scales. However, these models fail to reproduce the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal on non-linear scales, over-predicting the observed signal up to 40%. With ongoing Stage-IV galaxy surveys such as DESI and EUCLID, it is now crucial to accurately model the galaxy-halo connection up to intra-halo scales to accurately estimate theoretical uncertainties of perturbative models. This paper compares the standard HOD model to an extended HOD framework that incorporates as additional features galaxy assembly bias and local environmental dependencies on halo occupation. These models have been calibrated against the observed clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing signal of eBOSS Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) and Emission Lines Galaxies (ELG) in the range 0.6 < z < 1.1. A combined clustering-lensing cosmological analysis is then performed on the simulated galaxy samples of both standard and extended HOD frameworks to quantify the systematic budget of perturbative models. The extended HOD model offers a more comprehensive understanding of the connection between galaxies and their surroundings. In particular, we found that the LRGs preferentially occupy denser and more anisotropic environments. Our results highlight the importance of considering environmental factors in galaxy formation models, with an extended HOD framework that reproduces the observed signal within 20% on scales below 10 Mpc/h. Our cosmological analysis reveals that our perturbative model yields similar constraints regardless of the galaxy population, with a better goodness of fit for the extended HOD. These results suggest that the extended HOD framework should be used to quantify modeling systematics.