No Arabic abstract
Understanding the impact of environment on the formation and evolution of dark matter halos and galaxies is a crucial open problem. Studying statistical correlations in large simulated populations sheds some light on these impacts, but the causal effect of an environment on individual objects is harder to pinpoint. Addressing this, we present a new method for resimulating a single dark matter halo in multiple large-scale environments. In the initial conditions, we splice (i.e. insert) the Lagrangian region of a halo into different Gaussian random fields, while enforcing consistency with the statistical properties of $Lambda$CDM. Applying this technique, we demonstrate that the mass of halos is primarily determined by the density structure inside their Lagrangian patches, while the halos concentration is more strongly affected by environment. The splicing approach will also allow us to study, for example, the impact of the cosmic web on accretion processes and galaxy quenching.
The simplest analyses of halo bias assume that halo mass alone determines halo clustering. However, if the large scale environment is fixed, then halo clustering is almost entirely determined by environment, and is almost completely independent of halo mass. We show why. Our analysis is useful for studies which use the environmental dependence of clustering to constrain cosmological and galaxy formation models. It also shows why many correlations between galaxy properties and environment are merely consequences of the underlying correlations between halos and their environments, and provides a framework for quantifying such inherited correlations.
Hierarchical structure formation implies that the number of subhalos within a dark matter halo depends not only on halo mass, but also on the formation history of the halo. This dependence on the formation history, which is highly correlated with halo concentration, can account for the super-Poissonian scatter in subhalo occupation at a fixed halo mass that has been previously measured in simulations. Here we propose a model to predict the subhalo abundance function for individual host halos, that incorporates both halo mass and concentration. We combine results of cosmological simulations with a new suite of zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-mass halos to calibrate our model. We show the model can successfully reproduce the mean and the scatter of subhalo occupation in these simulations. The implications of this correlation between subhalo abundance and halo concentration are further investigated. We also discuss cases in which inferences about halo properties can be affected if this correlation between subhalo abundance and halo concentration is ignored; in these cases our model would give a more accurate inference. We propose that with future deep surveys, satellite occupation in the low-mass regime can be used to verify the existence of halo assembly bias.
Concentration is one of the key dark matter halo properties that could drive the scatter in the stellar-to-halo mass relation of massive clusters. We derive robust photometric stellar masses for a sample of brightest central galaxies (BCGs) in SDSS redMaPPer clusters at $0.17<z<0.3$, and split the clusters into two equal-halo mass subsamples by their BCG stellar mass $M_*$. The weak lensing profiles $DeltaSigma$ of the two cluster subsamples exhibit different slopes on scales below 1 M$pc/h$. To interpret such discrepancy, we perform a comprehensive Bayesian modelling of the two $DeltaSigma$ profiles by including different levels of miscentring effects between the two subsamples as informed by X-ray observations. We find that the two subsamples have the same average halo mass of $1.74 times 10^{14} M_{odot}/h$, but the concentration of the low-$M_*$ clusters is $5.87_{-0.60}^{+0.77}$, ${sim}1.5sigma$ smaller than that of their high-$M_*$ counterparts~($6.95_{-0.66}^{+0.78}$). Furthermore, both cluster weak lensing and cluster-galaxy cross-correlations indicate that the large-scale bias of the low-$M_*$, low-concentration clusters are ${sim}10%$ higher than that of the high-$M_*$, high-concentration systems, hence possible evidence of the cluster assembly bias effect. Our results reveal a remarkable physical connection between the stellar mass within 20{-}30 k$pc/h$, the dark matter mass within ${sim}$ 200 k$pc/h$, and the cosmic overdensity on scales above 10 M$pc/h$, enabling a key observational test of theories of co-evolution between massive clusters and their central galaxies.
The concentration-mass (c-M) relation encodes the key information of the assembly history of the dark matter halos, however its behavior at the high mass end has not been measured precisely in observations yet. In this paper, we report the measurement of halo c-M relation with galaxy-galaxy lensing method, using shear catalog of the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) Data Release 8, which covers a sky area of 9500 deg^2. The foreground lenses are selected from redMaPPer, LOWZ, and CMASS catalogs, with halo mass range from 10^{13} to 10^{15} M_sun and redshift range from z=0.08 to z=0.65. We find that the concentration decreases with the halo mass from 10^{13} to 10^{14} M_sun, but shows a trend of upturn after the pivot point of ~10^{14} M_sun. We fit the measured c-M relation with the concentration model c(M)=C_0 (M/(10^{12} M_sun/h)^{-gamma} [1+(M/M_0)^{0.4}], and get the values (C_0, gamma, log(M_0) = (5.119_{-0.185}^{0.183}, 0.205_{-0.010}^{0.010}, 14.083_{-0.133}^{0.130}), and (4.875_{-0.208}^{0.209}, 0.221_{-0.010}^{0.010}, 13.750_{-0.141}^{0.142}) for halos with 0.08<=z<0.35 and 0.35<=z<0.65, respectively. We also show that the model including an upturn is favored over a simple power-law model. Our measurement provides important information for the recent argument of massive cluster formation process.
Luminous matter produces very energetic events, such as active galactic nuclei and supernova explosions, that significantly affect the internal regions of galaxy clusters. Although the current uncertainty in the effect of baryonic physics on cluster statistics is subdominant as compared to other systematics, the picture is likely to change soon as the amount of high-quality data is growing fast, urging the community to keep theoretical systematic uncertainties below the ever-growing statistical precision. In this paper, we study the effect of baryons on galaxy clusters, and their impact on the cosmological applications of clusters, using the Magneticum suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. We show that the impact of baryons on the halo mass function can be recast in terms on a variation of the mass of the halos simulated with pure N-body, when baryonic effects are included. The halo mass function and halo bias are only indirectly affected. Finally, we demonstrate that neglecting baryonic effects on halos mass function and bias would significantly alter the inference of cosmological parameters from high-sensitivity next-generations surveys of galaxy clusters.