The mass–concentration–redshift relation of cold and warm dark matter haloes

By A. Ludlow, S. Bose, R. Angulo, Lang Wang, Wojciech A. Hellwing, J. Navarro, Shaun Cole, Carlos S. Frenk. 2016

228 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use a suite of cosmological simulations to study the mass–concentration–redshift relation, c(M, z), of dark matter haloes. Our simulations include standard Λ-cold dark matter (CDM) models, and additional runs with truncated power spectra, consistent with a thermal warm dark matter (WDM) scenario. We find that the mass profiles of CDM and WDM haloes are self-similar and well approximated by the Einasto profile. The c(M, z) relation of CDM haloes is monotonic: concentrations decrease with increasing virial mass at fixed redshift, and decrease with increasing redshift at fixed mass. The mass accretion histories (MAHs) of CDM haloes are also scale-free, and can be used to infer concentrations directly. These results do not apply to WDM haloes: their MAHs are not scale-free because of the characteristic scale imposed by the power spectrum suppression. Further, the WDM c(M, z) relation is non-monotonic: concentrations peak at a mass scale dictated by the truncation scale, and decrease at higher and lower masses. We show that the assembly history of a halo can still be used to infer its concentration, provided that the total mass of its progenitors is considered (the ‘collapsed mass history’; CMH), rather than just that of its main ancestor. This exploits the scale-free nature of CMHs to derive a simple scaling that reproduces the mass–concentration–redshift relation of both CDM and WDM haloes over a vast range of halo masses and redshifts. Our model therefore provides a robust account of the mass, redshift, cosmology and power spectrum dependence of dark matter halo concentrations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86118e7be44bd40291cd2e6617245b7ec400db41

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Citations in the corpus

An Accurate Physical Model for Halo Concentrations (2018, methodology): “This effect can partially explain the disagreements with the Correa et al. (2015c) and Ludlow et al. (2016) models, but not those with the Klypin et al. (2016) model.”
Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, unknown): “Note that Figure 2 of Ludlow et al. (2016) is similar to Figure 5, including also a comparison to warm dark matter cosmologies.”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, background): “Some fraction of this scatter is driven by the variation in halo mass accretion history (Wechsler et al. 2002; Ludlow et al. 2016), with early-forming halos having higher concentrations at fixed final virial mass.”
hmcode-2020: improved modelling of non-linear cosmological power spectra with baryonic feedback (2020, methodology): “While this works well for our purposes, as demonstrated in Section 3, it may be preferable to update the relations to those presented in Correa et al. (2015), Ludlow et al. (2016) or Diemer & Joyce (2019), where the concentration is tied to the halo mass-accretion history.”
COLOSSUS: A Python Toolkit for Cosmology, Large-scale Structure, and Dark Matter Halos (2017, background): “Second, concentration is strongly correlated with halo age, giving rise to models that base concentration on a description of halo formation times (e.g., Bullock et al. 2001; Wechsler et al. 2002; Zhao et al. 2003, 2009; Ludlow et al. 2016).”