Clustering properties and halo occupation of Lyman-break galaxies at z ~ 4

We investigate the clustering properties of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) at z ~ 4. Using the hierarchical galaxy formation model GALFORM, we predict the angular correlation function (ACF) of LBGs and compare this with the measured ACF from combined survey fields consisting of the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) and CANDELS. We find that the predicted ACF is in a good agreement with the measured ACFs. However, when we divide the model LBGs into bright and faint subset, the predicted ACFs are less consistent with observations. We quantify the dependence of clustering on luminosity and show that the fraction of satellite LBGs is important for determining the amplitude of ACF at small scales. We find that central LBGs predominantly reside in ${\sim}10^{11}h^{-1}M_{solar}$ haloes and satellites reside in haloes of mass ${\sim}10^{12}-10^{13}h^{-1}M_{solar}$. The model predicts fewer bright satellite LBGs than is inferred from the observation. LBGs in the tails of the redshift distribution contribute significant additional clustering signal, especially on small scales. This spurious clustering may affect the interpretation of the halo occupation distribution, including the minimum halo mass and abundance of satellite LBGs.