The Mass of a halo

By M. White. 2000

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss the different definitions of the mass of a halo in common use and how one may convert between them. Using N -body simulations we show that mass estimates based on spherical averages are much more tightly correlated with each other than with masses based on the number of particles in a halo. The mass functions pertaining to some different mass definitions are estimated and compared to the "universal form"of Jenkins et al. ([CITE]). Using a different simulation pipeline and a different cosmological model we show that the mass function is well fit by the Jenkins et al. ([CITE]) fitting function, strengthening the claim to universality made by those authors. We show that care must be taken to match the definitions of mass when using large N -body simulations to bootstrap scaling relations from smaller hydrodynamical runs to avoid observationally significant bias in the predictions for abundances of objects.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31beb1236bf582a32f1057cf383646306dc2e551

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Citations in the corpus

Toward a Halo Mass Function for Precision Cosmology: The Limits of Universality (2008, methodology): “Comparison of FOF and SO halos White (2001, 2002) demonstrated that there is scatter between the masses of halos identified with the FOF and SO halo definitions, as well as an offset between the mean halo masses using the canonical values of the linking lengthl = 0.2 in the FOF algorithm and…”
GALICS I: A hybrid N-body semi-analytic model of hierarchical galaxy formation (2003, background): “The precise density contrast at which to define a ‘virialized’ halo is a matter of some debate (White 2001), and in general depends on cosmology.”
DARK MATTER HALO PROFILES OF MASSIVE CLUSTERS: THEORY VERSUS OBSERVATIONS (2011, background): “(For discussionson halo mass, see White 2001, Lukić et al. 2009, and More et al. 2011.)”
Simulating the Universe with MICE: The abundance of massive clusters (2009, background): “…focused their attention on the redshift evolution of the MF (Reed et al. 2003, 2007; Lukic et al. 2007; Cohn & White 2007), different definitions of halo and halo mass (White 2001, 2002; Tinker et al. 2008) or the impact of gas physics associated with halo baryons (Stanek, Rudd & Evrard 2009a).”
Cosmic structure and dark energy (2003, background): “Theoretically the dark matter halo mass function has been explored in CDM models mainly through n-body simulations e.g. Efstathiou et al. (1988); Lacey & Cole (1994); Gross et al. (1998); Governato et al. (1999); Jenkins et al. (2001); White (2001, 2002).”
CHANDRA CLUSTER COSMOLOGY PROJECT. II. SAMPLES AND X-RAY DATA REDUCTION (2008, background): “The cluster mass is not a well-defined quantity and can be defined in a variety of ways (see, e.g., White 2001).”
THE LARGE-SCALE BIAS OF DARK MATTER HALOS: NUMERICAL CALIBRATION AND MODEL TESTS (2010, background): “The FOF algorithm is a percolation scheme that makes no assumptions about halo geometry, but may spuriously group distinct halos together into the same object, con- 2 fusing the comparison between cluster observables theoretical results (White 2001; Tinker et al. 2008; Lukić et al. 2009).”
The Halo Mass Function: High-Redshift Evolution and Universality (2007, background): “…meaningful comparisons to observations require overcoming many hurdles, e.g., an operational understanding of the definition of halo mass (see, e.g., White 2001), how it relates to various observations, and error control inN-body codes (see, e.g., O’Shea et al. 2005;Heitmann et al. 2005).”
The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich angular power spectrum as a probe of cosmological parameters (2002, methodology): “…should be compared with the current uncertainty inσ8 from the local cluster abundance studies, for which the systematic uncertainty is larger than 10% because of the uncertainty in the mass–temperature relation (e.g., Pierpaoli, Scott, & White 2001; Seljak 2001; Viana, Nichol,& Liddle 2002).”
The nearly universal merger rate of dark matter haloes in ΛCDM cosmology (2007, background): “We believe this is because mass definitions based on the assumption of spherical symmetry (as M200 does) have difficulties assigning accurate mass to non-spherical FOF haloes and c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–18 tend to underestimate the halo mass (see, e.g., White 2001).”
The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream (2018, background): “1 IN T RO D U C T I O N The total mass of a galaxy is hard to measure (White 2001).”
Measurement of Galaxy Cluster Sizes, Radial Profiles, and Luminosity Functions from SDSS Photometric Data (2004, background): “Still, there are a variety of definitions for both size and mass in use, as discussed in some detail by White (2001).”
Lectures on Dark Matter Physics (2016, background): “Also, it is not correct to think of a halo as having a finite end and establishing an adequate reference for comparing the sizes of different halos is a subtle point that we will not address here—see [7].”
Resolving cosmic structure formation with the Millennium-II simulation (2009, background): “While each subhalo has a single well-defined mass assigned to it – the sum of the masses of its constituent particles – multiple mass definitions for FOF halos are common in the literature (see White 2001 for a discussion of subtleties associated with assigning masses to halos).”
Characterizing the Cluster Lens Population (2005, methodology): “…we took the velocity dispersion of the BCG in Coma to be σ = 323 km s−1 (Fisher, Illingworth, & Franx 1995) and converted the X-ray temperature of Coma, TX = 8.0 keV (Edge & Stewart 1991), to a FOF group mass (b = 0.2) using the prescription described in White (2001) (see also Hu & Kravtsov 2003).”
Formation of Galaxy Clusters (2012, background): “Below we describe the main two such definitions: the Friends-of-Friends (FoF) and spherical overdensity (SO, see also White 2001).”
The halo mass function through the cosmic ages (2012, background): “The correspondence between SO haloes and FOF haloes has been studied, for example in White (2001, 2002), and recently empirical relations have been calculated by Lukic et al. (2009), Courtin et al. (2011) and More et al. (2011) that relate SO and FOF haloes in terms of their masses.”