Clustering of quasars in the first year of the SDSS-IV eBOSS survey: interpretation and halo occupation distribution

In current and future surveys, quasars play a key role. The new data will extend our knowledge of the Universe as it will be used to better constrain the cosmological model at redshift z > 1 via baryon acoustic oscillation and redshift space distortion measurements. Here, we present the first clustering study of quasars observed by the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We measure the clustering of ∼70 000 quasars located in the redshift range 0.9 < z < 2.2 that cover 1168 deg². We model the clustering and produce high-fidelity quasar mock catalogues based on the BigMultiDark Planck simulation. Thus, we use a modified (sub)halo abundance matching model to account for the specificities of the halo population hosting quasars. We find that quasars are hosted by haloes with masses ∼10^12.7 M_⊙ and their bias evolves from 1.54 (z = 1.06) to 3.15 (z = 1.98). Using the current extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey data, we cannot distinguish between models with different fractions of satellites. The high-fidelity mock light-cones, including properties of haloes hosting quasars, are made publicly available.