Cosmic variance and its effect on the luminosity function determination in deep high-z surveys

Abstract

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 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space Telescope (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 effects of environment on the fitting of the luminosity func..