The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS) : on the recovery of the count-in-cell probability distribution function

We compare three methods to measure the count-in-cell probability density function of galaxies in a spectroscopic redshift survey. From this comparison we found that, when the sampling is low (the average number of object per cell is around unity), it is necessary to use a parametric method to model the galaxy distribution. We used a set of mock catalogues of VIPERS to verify if we were able to reconstruct the cell-count probability distribution once the observational strategy is applied. We find that, in the simulated catalogues, the probability distribution of galaxies is better represented by a Gamma expansion than a skewed log-normal distribution. Finally, we correct the cell-count probability distribution function from the angular selection effect of the VIMOS instrument and study the redshift and absolute magnitude dependency of the underlying galaxy density function in VIPERS from redshift 0.5 to 1.1. We found a very weak evolution of the probability density distribution function and that it is well approximated by a Gamma distribution, independently of the chosen tracers.