Photometric Objects Around Cosmic Webs (PAC) Delineated in a Spectroscopic Survey. IV. High-precision Constraints on the Evolution of the Stellar–Halo Mass Relation at Redshift z < 0.7

Abstract

Taking advantage of the Photometric objects Around Cosmic webs method developed in Paper I, we measure the excess surface density ${\bar{n}}_{2}{w}_{{\rm{p}}}$ of the photometric objects around spectroscopic objects down to stellar masses 10 ^8.0 M _⊙ , 10 ^9.2 M _⊙ , and 10 ^9.8 M _⊙ in the redshift ranges of z _s < 0.2, 0.2 < z _s < 0.4, and 0.5 < z _s < 0.7, respectively, using data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys and spectroscopic samples from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (i.e., the Main, LOWZ, and CMASS samples). We model the measured ${\bar{n}}_{2}{w}_{{\rm{p}}}$ in an N -body simulation, using the abundance matching method, and we constrain the stellar–halo mass relations (SHMRs) in the three redshift ranges to percent levels. With the accurate modeling, we demonstrate that the stellar mass scatter for a given halo mass is nearly a constant, and that the empirical form of Behroozi et al. describes the SHMR better than the double-power-law form at low mass. Our SHMR accurately captures the downsizing of massive galaxies from z _s = 0.7, while it also indicates that small galaxies are still growing faster than their host halos. The galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMFs) from our modeling are in perfect agreement with the model-independent measurements in Paper III, although the current work extends the GSMFs to a much smaller stellar mass. Based on the GSMFs and the SHMRs, we derive the stellar mass completeness and halo occupation distributions for the LOWZ and CMASS samples, which are useful for correctly interpreting their cosmological measurements, such as galaxy–galaxy lensing and redshift space distortion.

Keywords

• Galaxy abundances
• Galaxy formation
• Galaxy properties
• Galaxy dark matter halos