Cosmic Variance and Its Effect on the Luminosity Function Determination in Deep High z Surveys

Understand

We study cosmic variance in deep high redshift surveys and its influence on the determination of the luminosity function for high redshift galaxies.

• For several survey geometries relevant for HST and JWST instruments, we characterize the distribution of the galaxy number counts.
• This is obtained by means of analytic estimates via the two point correlation function in extended Press-Schechter theory as well as by using synthetic catalogs extracted from N-body cosmological simulations of structure formation.
• We adopt a simple luminosity - dark halo mass relation to investigate the environment effects on the fitting of the luminosity function.