UC Berkeley

Understanding the formation and evolution of large-scale structure is a central problem in cosmology and enables precise tests of General Relativity on cosmological scales and constraints on dark energy. An essential ingredient is an accurate description of the pairwise velocities of biased tracers of the matter field. In this paper, we compute the first and second moments of the pairwise velocity distribution by extending the convolution Lagrangian perturbation theory (CLPT) formalism of Carlson et al. Our predictions outperform standard perturbation theory calculations in many cases when compared to statistics measured in N-body simulations. We combine the CLPT predictions of real-space clustering and velocity statistics in the Gaussian streaming model of Reid & White to obtain predictions for the monopole and quadrupole correlation functions accurate to 2 and 4 per cent, respectively, down to < 25 h-1 Mpc for haloes hosting the massive galaxies observed by SDSS-III BOSS.We also discuss contours of the 2D correlation function and clustering 'wedges'. We generalize the scheme to cross-correlation functions. © 2013 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.