Parameter sensitivity of cosmic pairwise velocities in the nonlinear regime of structure formation
Phys. Rev. D 113, 103519 – Published 12 May, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/f8rq-llf2
Abstract
The peculiar velocities of dark matter tracers drive the growth of cosmic structures, providing a sensitive test of cosmological models and strengthening constraints on the nature of dark energy. In this work, we investigate the mean pairwise velocities, , of dark matter tracers as a cosmological probe in the nonlinear regime of cosmic structure formation. Using -body dark matter-only simulations, we measure for pair separations up to and model it by solving the pair conservation equation for a self-gravitating particle system, along with various prescriptions of the nonlinear matter power spectrum. We quantified the sensitivity of to variations in key cosmological parameters such as , , , , and . Our parameter inference analysis using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) shows sub-11% agreement with simulation data, with notable degeneracies, particularly between and . We further compute the stable clustering crossing scale across redshifts , 0.5, and 1, assessing its dependence on cosmology. Among the tested power spectrum modeling approaches, we find that the csstemu emulator provides the most accurate predictions, with deviations below 5% for at . Our results are validated using independent simulation suites, demonstrating that our framework offers a robust method for extracting cosmological constraints from upcoming peculiar velocity data.