GRAVITATIONALLY CONSISTENT HALO CATALOGS AND MERGER TREES FOR PRECISION COSMOLOGY

By P. Behroozi, Risa Wechsler, Hao-Yi Wu, Michael T. Busha, Anatoly Klypin, Joel R. Primack. 2011

333 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new algorithm for generating merger trees and halo catalogs which explicitly ensures consistency of halo properties (mass, position, and velocity) across time steps. Our algorithm has demonstrated the ability to improve both the completeness (through detecting and inserting otherwise missing halos) and purity (through detecting and removing spurious objects) of both merger trees and halo catalogs. In addition, our method is able to robustly measure the self-consistency of halo finders; it is the first to directly measure the uncertainties in halo positions, halo velocities, and the halo mass function for a given halo finder based on consistency between snapshots in cosmological simulations. We use this algorithm to generate merger trees for two large simulations (Bolshoi and Consuelo) and evaluate two halo finders (rockstar and bdm). We find that both the rockstar and bdm halo finders track halos extremely well; in both, the number of halos which do not have physically consistent progenitors is at the 1%–2% level across all halo masses. Our code is publicly available at http://code.google.com/p/consistent-trees. Our trees and catalogs are publicly available at http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/Bolshoi/.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/399d44b792643bddbca9f800528bcb9ed1db72f6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Milky Way Satellite Census. II. Galaxy–Halo Connection Constraints Including the Impact of the Large Magellanic Cloud (2019, methodology): “Halo catalogs and merger trees were generated using the ROCKSTAR halo finder and the CONSISTENT-TREES merger code (Behroozi et al. 2013b,c).”
The dark side of galaxy colour (2013, background): “We use the z = 0 ROCKSTAR halo catalog and merger trees to model the galaxy colorhalo connection.”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, methodology): “Identifying substructure is more halo-finder dependent; here 6D phase-space based halo finders such as ROCKSTAR (Behroozi et al. 2013b) were found to perform significantly better.”
Galaxy assembly bias: a significant source of systematic error in the galaxy–halo relationship (2013, background): “ROCKSTAR is a phase-space, temporal halo finder capable of resolving Bolshoi halos and subhalos down to Vmax ∼ 55km s−1 (Behroozi et al. 2013a,b).”
ELVIS: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (2013, methodology): “Figure 9 shows the z = 0 AM relation published by Behroozi et al. (2013c) as the orange line.”
THE RELATION BETWEEN STAR FORMATION RATE AND STELLAR MASS FOR GALAXIES AT 3.5 ⩽ z ⩽ 6.5 IN CANDELS (2014, methodology): “Here, we use the parameterization of Behroozi et al. (2013a), who provide simple functions to track the number density evolution of the progenitors of galaxies.”
Too big to fail in the Local Group (2014, methodology): “We additionally select haloes that are expected to have formed stars based upon Vpeak, which is defined as Vmax of the main branch of the halo’s merger tree, built with CONSISTENT TREES (Behroozi et al. 2013b), at the timestep when the halo reaches its maximal mass (see GK14 for more details).”
Constraining the galaxy–halo connection over the last 13.3 Gyr: star formation histories, galaxy mergers and structural properties (2017, background): “…more accurate and consistent halo finders for determining halo properties and their progenitors from large N−body cosmological simulations (e.g., Behroozi et al. 2013, and references therein) not only make possible a more accurate modelling of the galaxy-halo connection but also allow…”
The illustris simulation: Public data release (2015, methodology): “, 2005a), and Consistent-Trees (using Rockstar, Behroozi et al. 2013, not discussed in detail here). These codes are all included in the Sussing Merger Trees comparison project (Srisawat et al., 2013). In the population average sense the different merger trees give similar results. In more detail, t”
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GALAXIES AND DARK MATTER STRUCTURES IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2012, methodology): “Consuelo (see also Behroozi et al. 2013a; Leauthaud et al. 2011) uses 14003 particles in a volume of (420h−1Mpc)3 (with a particle mass of 1.9×109, while Esmeralda has 12503 particles in (640h−1Mpc)3 (with a particle mass of 9.3× 109).”
EMERGE – an empirical model for the formation of galaxies since z ∼ 10 (2017, methodology): “Merger trees were generated using the ConsistentTrees algorithm (Behroozi et al. 2013c), providing a physically consistent evolution of halo properties across time steps.”
Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, methodology): “In this paper we use the Rockstar halo finder (Behroozi, Wechsler & Wu 2013) and Consistent Trees (Behroozi et al. 2013) to analyze results for the recent Bolshoi-Planck (BolshoiP), Small MultiDark-Planck (SMDPL) and MultiDark-Planck (MDPL) simulations based on the 2013 Planck cosmological…”
A UNIVERSAL MODEL FOR HALO CONCENTRATIONS (2014, methodology): “Rockstar finds the scale radius of a halo by fitting the NFW profile ρNFW = ρs (r/rs)(1 + r/rs)2 (7) to the halo’s spherical mass distribution.”
Sweating the small stuff: simulating dwarf galaxies, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and their own tiny satellites (2015, methodology): “This abundance matching relation, obtained by updating the Behroozi et al. (2013a) relation with a faint-end slope derived from the measurements of the GAMA survey (Baldry et al. 2012), accurately reproduces the stellar mass functions of the Milky Way and Andromeda satellites, as well as the…”
SEMI-ANALYTIC GALAXY EVOLUTION (SAGE): MODEL CALIBRATION AND BASIC RESULTS (2016, methodology): “Merger trees were subsequently constructed using consistent-trees (Behroozi et al. 2013b).6 2.3.”
The effective field theory of cosmological large scale structures (2012, methodology): “Specifically we consider random downsamples of positions and velocities of the Consuleo simulation(8) [28] from 2.”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, methodology): “The gray lines show the subhaloes that are less luminosity than Fornax using abundance matching technique from [545], and the blue lines show those with luminosity that match Fornax.”
Stellar Mass—Halo Mass Relation and Star Formation Efficiency in High-Mass Halos (2014, methodology): “…was calculated using current masses for hosts and corresponding masses at the accretion epoch for subhalos using z = 0 halo catalog halo catalog of Behroozi et al. (2013c) derived from the Bolshoi simulation (Klypin et al. 2011) of (250h−1Mpc)3 volume in the concordance cosmology adopted in this…”