One simulation to fit them all - changing the background parameters of a cosmological N-body simulation

By R. Angulo, Simon D. M. White. 2009

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We demonstrate that the output of a cosmological N-body simulation can, to remarkable accuracy, be scaled to represent the growth of large-scale structure in a cosmology with parameters similar to but different from those originally assumed. Our algorithm involves three steps: a reassignment of length, mass and velocity units; a relabelling of the time axis and a rescaling of the amplitudes of individual large-scale fluctuation modes. We test it using two matched pairs of simulations. Within each pair, one simulation assumes parameters consistent with analyses of the first-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data. The other has lower matter and baryon densities and a 15 per cent lower fluctuation amplitude, consistent with analyses of the three-year WMAP data. The pairs differ by a factor of a thousand in mass resolution, enabling performance tests on both linear and non-linear scales. Our scaling reproduces the mass power spectra of the target cosmology to better than 0.5 per cent on large scales (k < 0.1 h Mpc−1) both in real and in redshift space. In particular, the baryonic acoustic oscillation features of the original cosmology are removed and are correctly replaced by those of the target cosmology. Errors are still below 3 per cent for k < 1 h Mpc−1. Power spectra of the dark halo distribution are even more precisely reproduced, with errors below 1 per cent on all scales tested. A halo-by-halo comparison shows that centre-of-mass positions and velocities are reproduced to better than 90 h−1 kpc and 5 per cent, respectively. Halo masses, concentrations and spins are also reproduced at about the 10 per cent level, although with small biases. Halo assembly histories are accurately reproduced, leading to central galaxy magnitudes with errors of about 0.25 mag and a bias of about 0.13 mag for a representative semi-analytic model. This algorithm will enable a systematic exploration of the coupling between cosmological parameter estimates and uncertainties in galaxy formation in future large-scale structure surveys.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08725ad0375af3aa71cedbb3d1800d2eb384448e

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Citations in the corpus

Modelling baryon acoustic oscillations with perturbation theory and stochastic halo biasing (2013, methodology): “Interesting alternatives have been recently proposed, such as re-scalingN -body simulations to account for a change in the cosmological parameters (Angulo & White 2010), compute covariance matrices from a set of small-volume simulations (Schneider et al. 2011), orincluding 2LPT within the Vlasov…”
Scaling relations for galaxy clusters in the Millennium-XXL simulation (2012, methodology): “…discrepant at about the 3σ level with the latest constraints from CMB and LSS observations (Komatsu et al. 2011), the scaling technique proposed by Angulo & White (2010) (see also Ruiz et al. 2011) allows the Millennium simulations to provide theoretical models for the formation, evolution and…”
The mass–concentration–redshift relation of cold dark matter haloes (2013, result): “This result is consistent with the rescaling procedure outlined by Angulo & White (2010) to match the outcome of simulations adopting slightly different power spectra and cosmological parameters.”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, methodology): “3Results from the Millennium simulations have been rescaled to the latest set of cosmological parameters [268, 269].”
Galaxy formation in WMAP1 and WMAP7 cosmologies (2012, methodology): “C O Using the technique of Angulo & White (2010) we scale the Millennium and Millennium-II simulations of structure growth in a ΛCDM universe from the cosmological parameters with which they were carried out (based on first-year results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, WMAP1) to…”
Galaxy Protoclusters as Drivers of Cosmic Star Formation History in the First 2 Gyr (2017, methodology): “The two SAMs were run on the Millennium cosmological N -body simulation (Springel et al. 2005) scaled to the Planck (H15) and WMAP7 (G13) cosmologies following the techniqe in Angulo & White (2010).”
Simulations of the galaxy population constrained by observations from z = 3 to the present day: implications for galactic winds and the fate of their ejecta (2012, methodology): “The simulations can be scaled from the original WMAP1 cosmology to the currently preferred WMAP7 cosmology using the technique of Angulo & White (2010).”
The completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: BAO and RSD measurements from the anisotropic power spectrum of the quasar sample between redshift 0.8 and 2.2 (2020, methodology): “In a second stage, Smith et al. (2020) implemented the rescaling technique described in Mead & Peacock (2014) (itself based on the work of Angulo & White 2010) to create ‘blind’ mocks, whose the true cosmology was only revealed at the end of the analysis.”
Galactic star formation and accretion histories from matching galaxies to dark matter haloes (2012, methodology): “As these parameters are not consistent with the latest WMAP data analysis, we use the scaling recipe by Angulo & White (2010) to convert the properties of the simulations to represent the growth of structure in a WMAP7 cosmology.”
An accurate halo model for fitting non-linear cosmological power spectra and baryonic feedback models (2015, methodology): “…et al. 2013; Kilbinger et al. 2013), emulator-based strategies (Liu et al. 2015; Petri et al. 2015) or the technique of simulation rescaling (Angulo & White 2010; Angulo & Hilbert 2015) to provide predictions for the matter spectrum for the required scales; these predictions are then…”
MultiDark simulations: the story of dark matter halo concentrations and density profiles (2014, methodology): “Scaling simulations to other cosmologies, as suggested in Angulo & White (2010), is an important tool but lacks the required precision with respect to halo properties.”
Erratum: From dwarf spheroidals to cD galaxies: simulating the galaxy population in a ΛCDM cosmology (2010, methodology): “We intend to test this explicitly in future work by using the rescaling techniques of Angulo & White (2010) on the MS and MS-II so that they can be used to construct galaxy formation models very similar to those of this paper, but for cosmologies other than that originally assumed for the…”
Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, methodology): “To do that, we repeat 1 We did not use the Millennium simulation as is, but first converted it to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 7 cosmology used in Illustris following Angulo & White (2010) and Angulo et al. (2012).”
Galaxy formation in the Planck cosmology – I. Matching the observed evolution of star formation rates, colours and stellar masses (2014, methodology): “We use the technique of Angulo & White (2010), as updated by Angulo & Hilbert (2014), to scale the evolution of dark matter structure predicted by the Millennium and Millennium-II Simulations to the recently published Planck cosmology.”