No Arabic abstract
We investigate the role of angular momentum in the clustering of dark matter haloes. We make use of data from two high-resolution N-body simulations spanning over four orders of magnitude in halo mass, from $10^{9.8}$ to $10^{14} h^{-1} text{M}_odot$. We explore the hypothesis that mass accretion in filamentary environments alters the angular momentum of a halo, thereby driving a correlation between the spin parameter $lambda$ and the strength of clustering. However, we do not find evidence that the distribution of matter on large scales is related to the spin of haloes. We find that a halos spin is correlated with its age, concentration, sphericity, and mass accretion rate. Removing these correlations strongly affects the strength of secondary spin bias at low halo masses. We also find that high spin haloes are slightly more likely to be found near another halo of comparable mass. These haloes that are found near a comparable mass neighbour - a textit{twin} - are strongly spatially biased. We demonstrate that this textit{twin bias}, along with the relationship between spin and mass accretion rates, statistically accounts for halo spin secondary bias.
Secondary halo bias, commonly known as assembly bias, is the dependence of halo clustering on a halo property other than mass. This prediction of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmology is essential to modelling the galaxy distribution to high precision and interpreting clustering measurements. As the name suggests, different manifestations of secondary halo bias have been thought to originate from halo assembly histories. We show conclusively that this is incorrect for cluster-size haloes. We present an up-to-date summary of secondary halo biases of high-mass haloes due to various halo properties including concentration, spin, several proxies of assembly history, and subhalo properties. While concentration, spin, and the abundance and radial distribution of subhaloes exhibit significant secondary biases, properties that directly quantify halo assembly history do not. In fact, the entire assembly histories of haloes in pairs are nearly identical to those of isolated haloes. In general, a global correlation between two halo properties does not predict whether or not these two properties exhibit similar secondary biases. For example, assembly history and concentration (or subhalo abundance) are correlated for both paired and isolated haloes, but follow slightly different conditional distributions in these two cases. This results in a secondary halo bias due to concentration (or subhalo abundance), despite the lack of assembly bias in the strict sense for cluster-size haloes. Due to this complexity, caution must be exercised in using any one halo property as a proxy to study the secondary bias due to another property.
We explore the phenomenon commonly known as halo assembly bias, whereby dark matter halos of the same mass are found to be more or less clustered when a second halo property is considered, for halos in the mass range $3.7 times 10^{11} ; h^{-1} mathrm{M_{odot}} - 5.0 times 10^{13} ; h^{-1} mathrm{M_{odot}}$. Using the Large Suite of Dark Matter Simulations (LasDamas) we consider nine commonly used halo properties and find that a clustering bias exists if halos are binned by mass or by any other halo property. This secondary bias implies that no single halo property encompasses all the spatial clustering information of the halo population. The mean values of some halo properties depend on their halos distance to a more massive neighbor. Halo samples selected by having high values of one of these properties therefore inherit a neighbor bias such that they are much more likely to be close to a much more massive neighbor. This neighbor bias largely accounts for the secondary bias seen in halos binned by mass and split by concentration or age. However, halos binned by other mass-like properties still show a secondary bias even when the neighbor bias is removed. The secondary bias of halos selected by their spin behaves differently than that for other halo properties, suggesting that the origin of the spin bias is different than of other secondary biases.
The development of methods and algorithms to solve the $N$-body problem for classical, collisionless, non-relativistic particles has made it possible to follow the growth and evolution of cosmic dark matter structures over most of the Universes history. In the best studied case $-$ the cold dark matter or CDM model $-$ the dark matter is assumed to consist of elementary particles that had negligible thermal velocities at early times. Progress over the past three decades has led to a nearly complete description of the assembly, structure and spatial distribution of dark matter haloes, and their substructure in this model, over almost the entire mass range of astronomical objects. On scales of galaxies and above, predictions from this standard CDM model have been shown to provide a remarkably good match to a wide variety of astronomical data over a large range of epochs, from the temperature structure of the cosmic background radiation to the large-scale distribution of galaxies. The frontier in this field has shifted to the relatively unexplored subgalactic scales, the domain of the central regions of massive haloes, and that of low-mass haloes and subhaloes, where potentially fundamental questions remain. Answering them may require: (i) the effect of known but uncertain baryonic processes (involving gas and stars), and/or (ii) alternative models with new dark matter physics. Here we present a review of the field, focusing on our current understanding of dark matter structure from $N$-body simulations and on the challenges ahead.
We explore the boundary of dark matter haloes through their bias and velocity profiles. Using cosmological $N$-body simulations, we show that the bias profile exhibits a ubiquitous trough that can be interpreted as created by halo accretion that depletes material around the boundary. The inner edge of the active depletion region is marked by the location of the maximum mass inflow rate that separates a growing halo from the draining environment. This inner depletion radius can also be interpreted as the radius enclosing a highly complete population of splashback orbits, and matches the optimal exclusion radius in a halo model of the large-scale structure. The minimum of the bias trough defines a characteristic depletion radius, which is located within the infall region bounded by the inner depletion radius and the turnaround radius, while approaching the turnaround radius in low mass haloes that have stopped mass accretion. The characteristic depletion radius depends the most on halo mass and environment. It is approximately $2.5$ times the virial radius and encloses an average density of $sim 40$ times the background density of the universe, independent on halo mass but dependent on other halo properties. The inner depletion radius is smaller by $10-20%$ and encloses an average density of $sim 63$ times the background density. These radii open a new window for studying the properties of haloes.
We study the effect of baryons on the abundance of structures and substructures in a Lambda-CDM cosmology, using a pair of high resolution cosmological simulations from the GIMIC project. Both simulations use identical initial conditions, but while one contains only dark matter, the other also includes baryons. We find that gas pressure, reionisation, supernova feedback, stripping, and truncated accretion systematically reduce the total mass and the abundance of structures below ~10^12 solar masses compared to the pure dark matter simulation. Taking this into account and adopting an appropriate detection threshold lowers the abundance of observed galaxies with maximum circular velocities below 100 km/s, significantly reducing the reported discrepancy between Lambda-CDM and the measured HI velocity function of the ALFALFA survey. We also show that the stellar-to-total mass ratios of galaxies with stellar masses of ~10^5 - 10^7 solar masses inferred from abundance matching of the (sub)halo mass function to the observed galaxy mass function increase by a factor of ~2. In addition, we find that an important fraction of low-mass subhaloes are completely devoid of stars. Accounting for the presence of dark subhaloes below 10^10 solar masses further reduces the abundance of observable objects, and leads to an additional increase in the inferred stellar-to-total mass ratio by factors of 2 - 10 for galaxies in haloes of 10^9 - 10^10 solar masses. This largely reconciles the abundance matching results with the kinematics of individual dwarf galaxies in Lambda-CDM. We propose approximate corrections to the masses of objects derived from pure dark matter calculations to account for baryonic effects.