THE SPIN AND ORIENTATION OF DARK MATTER HALOS WITHIN COSMIC FILAMENTS

By Youcai Zhang, Xiaohu Yang, A. Faltenbacher, Volker Springel, Weipeng Lin, Huiyuan Wang. 2009

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Clusters, filaments, sheets, and voids are the building blocks of the cosmic web. Forming dark matter halos respond to these different large-scale environments, and this in turn affects the properties of galaxies hosted by the halos. It is therefore important to understand the systematic correlations of halo properties with the morphology of the cosmic web, as this informs both about galaxy formation physics and possible systematics of weak lensing studies. In this study, we present and compare two distinct algorithms for finding cosmic filaments and sheets, a task which is far less well established than the identification of dark matter halos or voids. One method is based on the smoothed dark matter density field and the other uses the halo distributions directly. We apply both techniques to one high-resolution N-body simulation and reconstruct the filamentary/sheet like network of the dark matter density field. We focus on investigating the properties of the dark matter halos inside these structures, in particular, on the directions of their spins and the orientation of their shapes with respect to the directions of the filaments and sheets. We find that both the spin and the major axes of filament halos with masses ≲1013 h−1 M☉ are preferentially aligned with the direction of the filaments. The spins and major axes of halos in sheets tend to lie parallel to the sheets. There is an opposite mass dependence of the alignment strength for the spin (negative) and major (positive) axes, i.e. with increasing halo mass the major axis tends to be more strongly aligned with the direction of the filament, whereas the alignment between halo spin and filament becomes weaker with increasing halo mass. The alignment strength as a function of the distance to the most massive node halo indicates that there is a transit large-scale environment impact: from the two-dimensional collapse phase of the filament to the three-dimensional collapse phase of the cluster/node halo at small separation. Overall, the two algorithms for filament/sheet identification investigated here agree well with each other. The method based on halos alone can be easily adapted for use with observational data sets.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/895dad0527ee77c4819e4756a98f31b6f0726858

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Citations in the corpus

Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web (2014, methodology): “Using N-body simulations, which model only dark matter (DM), Hahn et al. (2007a) and Zhang et al. (2009) found halo spins preferentially oriented perpendicular to the filaments independent of halo mass. Hatton & Ninin (2001) claimed to detect an alignment between spin and filament, while…”
Evolution of the cosmic web (2014, background): “…correlation between halo shape and spin orientations and the directions of filaments and walls (Altay, Colberg & Croft 2006; Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007b; Hahn et al. 2007a,b, 2009; Paz, Stasyszyn & Padilla 2008; Zhang et al. 2009; Codis et al. 2012; Libeskind et al. 2013a; Aragon-Calvo & Yang 2014).”
Galaxy Alignments: An Overview (2015, background): “Galaxy-size haloes tend to have their angular momenta aligned parallel to filaments (e.g. Hahn et al. 2007b; Zhang et al. 2009; Libeskind et al. 2013).”
The shape of dark matter haloes in the Aquarius simulations: evolution and memory (2011, result): “The measurement of the size of a filament is not completely straightforward and may depend on the particular algorithm used for its identification (Stoica et al. 2005; Zhang et al. 2009).”
The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, result): “…al. (2000), and unify sometimes contradictory previous measurements (e.g., Hatton and Ninin (2001); Faltenbacher et al. (2002); Hahn et al. (2007); Zhang et al. (2009)) with the identification of the transition mass. Cen (2014) has also shown that mergers play a significant role in the…”
Connecting the cosmic web to the spin of dark haloes: implications for galaxy formation (2012, methodology): “Zhang et al. (2009) found the same result, but did not have enough statistics to probe the signal above the critical mass.”
Spin alignments within the cosmic web: a theory of constrained tidal torques near filaments (2015, methodology): “It has been shown in simulations (Bailin & Steinmetz 2005; Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007; Paz et al. 2008; Zhang et al. 2009; Codis et al. 2012; Libeskind et al. 2013; Forero-Romero et al. 2014, among others) that the spin of dark haloes is correlated to the direction of the filaments of the cosmic web…”
Detecting filamentary pattern in the cosmic web: a catalogue of filaments for the SDSS (2013, background): “…dark matter haloes is correlated with the underlying web elements (Navarro, Abadi & Steinmetz 2004; Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007a; Brunino et al. 2007; Zhang et al. 2009; Hahn, Teyssier & Carollo 2010; Codis et al. 2012; Libeskind et al. 2012, 2013; Aragón-Calvo 2013; Trowland, Lewis &…”
NEXUS: Tracing the cosmic web connection (2012, methodology): “Recent N -body simulations have found that the filamentary or sheetlike nature of the environment has a distinct influence on the shape and spin orientation of dark matter haloes (Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007a; Hahn et al. 2007a,b; Paz et al. 2008; Hahn et al. 2009; Hahn 2009; Zhang et al. 2009).”
Evidence for spin alignment of spiral and elliptical/S0 galaxies in filaments (2012, background): “…indicate that the correlation of spin axes of dark matter haloes with filaments (sheets) is halo mass dependent (Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007b; Zhang et al. 2009; Codis et al. 2012; Trowland et al. 2012): spin axes of low-mass haloes tend to lie parallel to the filaments, while high-mass…”
Multiscale phenomenology of the cosmic web (2010, background): “In the case of the alignment of halos with their embedding filaments, Aragón-Calvo et al. (2007a) and Hahn et al. (2007) found evidence for a mass and redshift dependence, which has been confirmed by the studies of Paz et al. (2008) and Zhang et al. (2009).”
ON THE ACCURACY OF WEAK-LENSING CLUSTER MASS RECONSTRUCTIONS (2010, background): “…neighbor and the filament connecting the halos (e.g., Splinter et al. 1997; Onuora & Thomas 2000; Faltenbacher et al. 2002; Hopkins et al. 2005; Bailin & Steinmetz 2005; Kasun & Evrard 2005; Basilakos et al. 2006; Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007; Lee & Evrard 2007; Hahn et al. 2007; Zhang et al. 2009).”
The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (2011, background): “Simulations and theory predict an alignment between halo spin and the tidal field (Lee & Pen 2000), and an alignment with features in the tidal field like fil- c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 aments (Zhang et al. 2009), sheets (Lee 2004) and voids (Brunino et al. 2007).”