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

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 for dark-matter haloes in real and redshift space and compare them to the LA and non-linear 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.