Galaxy formation in modified gravity – II. galaxy halo connection and assembly bias

Abstract Modern surveys such as DESI and Euclid, which collect data for hundreds of millions of galaxies to map the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe, hold the key to determining the cosmological parameters and testing new physics. This ambition, however, is limited by uncertainties in the galaxy-halo connection: the link between observed galaxies and the underlying, unobservable matter field, by accounting for effects such as galaxy bias and assembly bias (AB). These are particularly poorly-understood for modified gravity (MG) models, which are popular alternatives to the cosmological constant to explain accelerated expansion. We approach this problem using mock emission line galaxy (ELG) and luminous red galaxy (LRG) catalogues in f(R) gravity matching the specifications of ongoing Stage-IV galaxy surveys, generated from state-of-the-art MG hydrodynamical simulations. While the interplay between MG—especially the chameleon screening mechanism—and galaxy formation leaves complicated imprints in the galaxy-halo connection, a simple physical picture emerges in which halo and galaxy formation are enhanced for progressively more massive haloes over time. We confirm that the basic galaxy-halo connection model, the halo occupation distribution (HOD), in which galaxy occupation is determined solely by halo mass, underestimates galaxy clustering strength in ΛCDM by 10–20 at z ≲ 1 when neglecting AB, and demonstrate that MG introduces further complexity. Extending this model with a suitably-chosen environment density as a secondary HOD variable reduces the AB effect in all models to 2–3 % for z ≲ 0.5. This provides a well-motivated starting point for further works on minimising the impact of AB when testing non-standard cosmological models with LSS.