Large scale bias and the inaccuracy of the peak-background split

Understand

The peak-background split argument is commonly used to relate the abundance of dark matter halos to their spatial clustering.

• Testing this argument requires an accurate determination of the halo mass function.
• We present a Maximum Likelihood method for fitting parametric functional forms to halo abundances which differs from previous work because it does not require binned counts.
• Our conclusions do not depend on whether we use our method or more conventional ones.