Impact of baryon physics on dark matter structures: a detailed simulation study of halo density profiles

By Alan R. Duffy, Joop Schaye, S. Kay, Claudio Dalla Vecchia, R. Battye, C. Booth. 2010

269 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The back-reaction of baryons on the dark matter halo density profile is of great interest, not least because it is an important systematic uncertainty when attempting to detect the dark matter. Here, we draw on a large suite of high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to systematically investigate this process and its dependence on the baryonic physics associated with galaxy formation. The effects of baryons on the dark matter distribution are typically not well described by adiabatic contraction models. In the inner 10 per cent of the virial radius the models are only successful if we allow their parameters to vary with baryonic physics, halo mass and redshift, thereby removing all predictive power. On larger scales the profiles from dark matter only simulations consistently provide better fits than adiabatic contraction models, even when we allow the parameters of the latter models to vary. The inclusion of baryons results in significantly more concentrated density profiles if radiative cooling is efficient and feedback is weak. The dark matter halo concentration can in that case increase by as much as 30 (10) per cent on galaxy (cluster) scales. The most significant effects occur in galaxies at high redshift, where there is a strong anticorrelation between the baryon fraction in the halo centre and the inner slope of both the total and the dark matter density profiles. If feedback is weak, isothermal inner profiles form, in agreement with observations of massive, early-type galaxies. However, we find that active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback, or extremely efficient feedback from massive stars, is necessary to match observed stellar fractions in groups and clusters, as well as to keep the maximum circular velocity similar to the virial velocity as observed for disc galaxies. These strong feedback models reduce the baryon fraction in galaxies by a factor of 3 relative to the case with no feedback. The AGN is even capable of reducing the baryon fraction by a factor of 2 in the inner region of group and cluster haloes. This in turn results in inner density profiles which are typically shallower than isothermal and the halo concentrations tend to be lower than in the absence of baryons. We therefore conclude that the disagreement between the concentrations inferred from observations of groups of galaxies and predictions from simulations that was identified by Duffy et al. is not alleviated by the inclusion of baryons.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40e0865faa8cbd9f80c2a1c174c6ccc61b6af9b2

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Citations in the corpus

Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, background): “Only recently have these effects been demonstrated in fully cosmological simulations of galaxy formation (Johansson et al. 2009; Abadi et al. 2010; Duffy et al. 2010; Macciò et al. 2012; Martizzi et al. 2012; Governato et al. 2012).”
The accretion history of dark matter haloes - III. A physical model for the concentration-mass relation (2015, unknown): “M relation and will modify the inner density profile (e.g. Duffy et al. 2010; Governato et al. 2012; Teyssier et al. 2013; Schaller et al. 2014).”
The milky way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2 (2019, methodology): “The response of the DM halo to the baryonic component depends on the galaxy assembly history (e.g. Duffy et al. 2010; Dutton et al. 2016; Artale et al. 2019); the good agreement between the halo contraction predictions in our three simulations suites reflects the fact that these simulations have…”
Mass models of the Milky Way (2011, background): “Baryonic physics is likely to have an effect on the concentration, much as it does on the inner density profile (Duffy et al. 2010), but we neglect that in this study.”
The effects of galaxy formation on the matter power spectrum: a challenge for precision cosmology (2011, result): “This is consistent with Duffy et al. (2010), who used the same simulation to show that AGN feedback decreases the concentrations of dark matter haloes of groups of galaxies.”
GALAXIES IN ΛCDM WITH HALO ABUNDANCE MATCHING: LUMINOSITY–VELOCITY RELATION, BARYONIC MASS–VELOCITY RELATION, VELOCITY FUNCTION, AND CLUSTERING (2010, background): “More recent simulations indicate an even smaller compression (Tissera et al. 2010; Duffy et al. 2010).”
Quantifying the effect of baryon physics on weak lensing tomography (2011, background): “Because of the back-reaction of the baryons on the dark matter, baryonic effects will also induce changes in the dark matter distribution within haloes (e.g., Duffy et al. 2010) and in the dark matter power spectrum (van Daalen et al. 2011).”
Moving mesh cosmology: numerical techniques and global statistics (2011, background): “…also made it clear that a proper inclusion of the baryonic physics can lead to interesting back reactions on the DM distribution (D’Onghia et al. 2010a; Duffy et al. 2010), potentially eliminating or reducing the central DM cusp (Governato et al. 2010), or forming a dark disc (Read et al. 2008).”
The Canadian Cluster Comparison Project: detailed study of systematics and updated weak lensing masses (2015, methodology): “Duffy et al. (2010) found that the change in concentration is <10 per cent for cluster-mass haloes.”
Combined strong and weak lensing analysis of 28 clusters from the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey (2011, background): “…and star formation indicate that the concentration can be significantly enhanced by baryon physics particularly for low-mass haloes (e.g., Rudd, Zentner, & Kravtsov 2008; Mead et al. 2010), although the effect strongly depends on the efficiency of feedback (Duffy et al. 2010; McCarthy et al. 2010).”
A UNIVERSAL MODEL FOR HALO CONCENTRATIONS (2014, result): “Although ultimately the concentrations of realistic halos are impacted by baryonic effects which are still rather uncertain (Rudd et al. 2008; Duffy et al. 2010; Velliscig et al. 2014), the results presented in this paper demonstrate that a simple, universal baseline model of concentrations does…”
Jet-regulated cooling catastrophe (2010, background): “We see that the stellar fraction at r500 has been lowered by more than a factor of 2, which is comparable with the results obtained by Duffy et al. (2010).”
CLASH-VLT: The mass, velocity-anisotropy, and pseudo-phase-space density profiles of the z = 0.44 galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847 (2013, background): “Cluster concentrations may be affected by major mergers (Hoffman et al. 2007) and/or baryon cooling (Gnedin et al. 2004; Duffy et al. 2010; Rasia et al. 2013) which tends to steepen the cMr (Fedeli 2012).”
CLASH: WEAK-LENSING SHEAR-AND-MAGNIFICATION ANALYSIS OF 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2014, background): “M relation, especially for less massive halos (Duffy et al. 2010; Bhattacharya et al. 2013).”
Dark halo response and the stellar initial mass function in early-type and late-type galaxies (2010, background): “Recent hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation yield even weaker halo contraction (Abadi et al. 2010; Duffy et al. 2010; Pedrosa et al. 2010; Tissera et al. 2010).”
The mass distribution and gravitational potential of the Milky Way (2016, background): “…influence will be at the centre, but whether, for Milky Way sized galaxies, this influence will beto steepen the inner density ‘cusp’ (corresponding toγ > 1 in eq.5) or to weaken it, producing more of a ‘core’ (γ < 1) is an active area of research (e.g.Duffy et al. 2010; Governato et al. 2012).”
The ATLAS3D project XV: benchmark for early-type galaxies scaling relations from 260 dynamical models: mass-to-light ratio, dark matter, fundamental plane and mass plane (2012, background): “However, recent simulations suggest that baryonic effects produce flatter haloes than these predictions for a broad range of galaxy masses (Duffy et al. 2010; Governato et al. 2010; Inoue & Saitoh 2011; Laporte et al. 2012; Macciò et al. 2012; Martizzi et al. 2012; Pontzen & Governato 2012).”
A mass-dependent density profile for dark matter haloes including the influence of galaxy formation (2014, unknown): “…outﬂows driven by stellar or AGN feedback (Navarro, Eke & Frenk 1996a ; Mo & Mao 2004 ; Read & Gilmore2005; Mashchenko, Couchman & Wadsley 2006; Duffy et al. 2010; Pontzen & Governato 2012; Martizzi, Teyssier & Moore 2013) and dynamical friction (El-Zant, Shlosman & Hoffman 2001; Tonini, Lapi…”