Testing tidal alignment models for anisotropic correlations of halo ellipticities with N-body simulations

Abstract: There is a growing interest of using the intrinsic alignment (IA) of galaxy images as a tool to extract cosmological information complimentary to galaxy clustering analysis. Recently, Okumura & Taruya derived useful formulas for the intrinsic ellipticity--ellipticity correlation, the gravitational shear--intrinsic ellipticity correlation, and the velocity--intrinsic ellipticity correlation functions based on the linear alignment (LA) model. In this paper, using large-volume $N$-body simulations, we measure these alignment statistics in real and redshift space and compare them to the LA and nonlinear alignment model predictions. We find that anisotropic features of baryon acoustic oscillations in the IA statistics can be accurately predicted by our models. The anisotropy due to redshift-space distortions (RSDs) is also well described in the large-scale limit. Our results indicate that one can extract the cosmological information encoded in the IA through the Alcock-Paczynski and RSD effects.