ACCURATE UNIVERSAL MODELS FOR THE MASS ACCRETION HISTORIES AND CONCENTRATIONS OF DARK MATTER HALOS

By Dong Zhao, Yipeng Jing, H. Mo, G. Börner. 2008

376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A large amount of observations have constrained cosmological parameters and the initial density fluctuation spectrum to a very high accuracy. However, cosmological parameters change with time and the power index of the power spectrum dramatically varies with mass scale in the so-called concordance ΛCDM cosmology. Thus, any successful model for its structural evolution should work well simultaneously for various cosmological models and different power spectra. We use a large set of high-resolution N-body simulations of a variety of structure formation models (scale-free, standard CDM, open CDM, and ΛCDM) to study the mass accretion histories, the mass and redshift dependence of concentrations, and the concentration evolution histories of dark matter halos. We find that there is significant disagreement between the much-used empirical models in the literature and our simulations. Based on our simulation results, we find that the mass accretion rate of a halo is tightly correlated with a simple function of its mass, the redshift, parameters of the cosmology, and of the initial density fluctuation spectrum, which correctly disentangles the effects of all these factors and halo environments. We also find that the concentration of a halo is strongly correlated with the universe age when its progenitor on the mass accretion history first reaches 4% of its current mass. According to these correlations, we develop new empirical models for both the mass accretion histories and the concentration evolution histories of dark matter halos, and the latter can also be used to predict the mass and redshift dependence of halo concentrations. These models are accurate and universal: the same set of model parameters works well for different cosmological models and for halos of different masses at different redshifts, and in the ΛCDM case the model predictions match the simulation results very well even though halo mass is traced to about 0.0005 times the final mass, when cosmological parameters and the power index of the initial density fluctuation spectrum have changed dramatically. Our model predictions also match the PINOCCHIO mass accretion histories very well, which are much independent of our numerical simulations and our definitions of halo merger trees. These models are also simple and easy to implement, making them very useful in modeling the growth and structure of dark matter halos. We provide appendices describing the step-by-step implementation of our models. A calculator which allows one to interactively generate data for any given cosmological model is provided on the Web, together with a user-friendly code to make the relevant calculations and some tables listing the expected concentration as a function of halo mass and redshift in several popular cosmological models. We explain why ΛCDM and open CDM halos on nearly all mass scales show two distinct phases in their mass growth histories. We discuss implications of the universal relations we find in connection to the formation of dark matter halos in the cosmic density field.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f9f43c9489ff79ff9744bf8b1ef5feb07c743a8

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Citations in the corpus

The Observed Growth of Massive Galaxy Clusters I: Statistical Methods and Cosmological Constraints (2009, background): “…sensitive to the assumed concentration parameter, since both r500 and r300 m(z) are well beyond the NFW scale radius for reasonable values (c > 3; Zhao et al. 2003, 2009; Gao et al. 2008). in Section 6.2, uncertainty on the mass function at this level has negligible impact on our results, in any…”
EVOLUTION OF THE GALAXY–DARK MATTER CONNECTION AND THE ASSEMBLY OF GALAXIES IN DARK MATTER HALOS (2011, methodology): “The second uses the analytical model of Y11 (see also Section 2.4), which relies on the fitting formula of Zhao et al. (2009) to describe the mean assembly history for halos of a given final mass and adopts a lognormal dispersion around the mean main-branch mass at each time.”
The mass profile and accretion history of cold dark matter haloes (2013, methodology): “…well as the influence of varying the spectral index or the cosmological parameters, provided that realistic accretion histories are available, either through direct numerical simulation or through well-tested semi-analytic modeling (e.g., Monaco et al. 2002; van den Bosch 2002; Zhao et al. 2009).”
Cosmological constraints from a combination of galaxy clustering and lensing – I. Theoretical framework (2012, result): “This is comparable to the differences in the c̄(M, z) relation obtained by different authors (e.g., Eke, Navarro & Steinmetz 2001; Bullock et al. 2001; Macció et al. 2007; Zhao et al. 2009).”
There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, methodology): “…studied extensively via N -body simulations and extended Press-Schechter (1974) theory (Lacey & Cole 1993, 1994; Wechsler et al. 2002; van den Bosch 2002; Zhao et al. 2003b,a; Tasitsiomi et al. 2004; Cohn & White 2005; Neistein et al. 2006; Li et al. 2008; Zhao et al. 2009; McBride et al. 2009).”
DEPENDENCE OF THE OUTER DENSITY PROFILES OF HALOS ON THEIR MASS ACCRETION RATE (2014, methodology): “While a halo is in the fast accretion regime, its concentration is approximately constant, cvir ≈ 4 (Zhao et al. 2009).”
Early galaxy formation and its large-scale effects (2018, background): “Zhao et al. (2003, 2009) were the first to find that the concentration flattens at large masses and at high redshifts.”
GRAVITATIONALLY CONSISTENT HALO CATALOGS AND MERGER TREES FOR PRECISION COSMOLOGY (2011, background): “…at the next timestep (the descendant) if the majority of the particles in the progenitor end up in the descendant (e.g., Planelles & Quilis 2010; Zhao et al. 2009; Fakhouri & Ma 2008; Li et al. 2007; Nagashima et al. 2005; Helly et al. 2003; Hatton et al. 2003; Wechsler et al. 2002; Tormen…”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, background): “relationship, its scatter, and its evolution with time [33–35].”
Cold dark matter haloes in the Planck era: evolution of structural parameters for Einasto and NFW profiles (2014, background): “The lower right panel shows the Zhao et al. (2009) model.”
CLASH: WEAK-LENSING SHEAR-AND-MAGNIFICATION ANALYSIS OF 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2014, background): “…Okabe et al. (2013) found a mean concentration of c200c = 4.22 +0.40 −0.36 at their effective halo mass of M200c = (8.5±0.6)×1014M h−170 , which exceeds the predicted concentration from numerical simulations (Duffy et al. 2008; Zhao et al. 2009; Bhattacharya et al. 2013; De Boni et al. 2013).”
The merger rates and mass assembly histories of dark matter haloes in the two Millennium simulations (2010, methodology): “…been done in quantifying halo mass accretion and assembly histories using N -body simulations that are smaller than the Millennium runs (e.g., Lacey & Cole 1994; Tormen et al. 1997; Tormen 1998; Wechsler et al. 2002; van den Bosch 2002; Li et al. 2007; Zhao et al. 2009, except Cole et al. 2008).”
On the origin of the galaxy star‐formation‐rate sequence: evolution and scatter (2009, background): “This parametrization nicely reproduces the distribution of halo concentrations of relaxed dark matter haloes in cosmological N-body simulations (e.g. Wechsler et al. 2002; Macciò et al. 2007, 2008; Zhao et al. 2009).”
THE PSEUDO-EVOLUTION OF HALO MASS (2012, background): “Much work has been invested into quantifying MAHs, but the contributions from physical accretion and pseudo-evolution are generally not distinguished (see, e.g.,Wechsler et al. 2002; van den Bosch 2002; Zhao et al. 2003; Miller et al. 2006; Zhao et al. 2009).”
ON THE CLUSTER PHYSICS OF SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH AND X-RAY SURVEYS. I. THE INFLUENCE OF FEEDBACK, NON-THERMAL PRESSURE, AND CLUSTER SHAPES ON Y–M SCALING RELATIONS (2011, background): “…as can be seen by the dramatically decreasing mass accretion rates implying that the associated virializing shocks have dissipated the energy associated with the growth of these objects and hence decreasing the kinetic pressure support (Wechsler et al. 2002; Zhao et al. 2009; Pfrommer et al. 2011).”
Cosmological Constraints from a Combination of Galaxy Clustering and Lensing -- III. Application to SDSS Data (2012, background): “…relation as obtained by different authors (e.g., Navarro, Frenk & White 1997; Eke, Navarro & Steinmetz 2001; Bullock et al. 2001; Macció et al. 2007; Zhao et al. 2009), and (ii) realistic dark matter haloes are triaxial, rather than spherical, have substructure, and have scatter in the…”
Halo concentrations in the standard LCDM cosmology (2011, methodology): “For example, Wechsler et al. (2002); Zhao et al. (2003, 2009) determine concentrations using accurate modeling of halo mass accretion histories.”