Building merger trees from cosmological N-body simulations. Towards improving galaxy formation model

By Dylan Tweed, J. Devriendt, Jérémy Blaizot, Stéphane Colombi, A. Slyz. 2009

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although a fair amount of work has been devoted to growing Monte-Carlo merger trees which resemble those built from an N-body simulation, comparatively little effort has been invested in quantifying the caveats one necessarily encounters when one extracts trees directly from such a simulation. To somewhat revert the tide, this paper seeks to provide its reader with a comprehensive study of the problems one faces when following this route. The first step to building merger histories of dark matter haloes and their subhaloes is to identify these structures in each of the time outputs (snapshots) produced by the simulation. Even though we discuss a particular implementation of such an algorithm (called AdaptaHOP) in this paper, we believe that our results do not depend on the exact details of the implementation but extend to most if not all (sub)structure finders. We then highlight different ways to build merger histories from AdaptaHOP haloes and subhaloes, contrasting their various advantages and drawbacks. We find that the best approach to (sub)halo merging histories is through an analysis that goes back and forth between identification and tree building rather than one which conducts a straightforward sequential treatment of these two steps. This is rooted in the complexity of the merging trees which have to depict an inherently dynamical process from the partial temporal information contained in the collection of instantaneous snapshots available from the N-body simulation.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8eefd690b208711411666048e298ea42d4d45ea4

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Citations in the corpus

Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, background): “…& Ma 2008; Firmani & Avila-Reese 2013) or high-resolution N−body simulations (Wechsler et al. 2002; Cohn & White 2005; McBride, Fakhouri & Ma 2009; Tweed et al. 2009; Fakhouri, Ma & Boylan-Kolchin 2010; Srisawat et al. 2013) or either both (Parkinson, Cole & Helly 2008; Jiang & van den Bosch…”
THE ROCKSTAR PHASE-SPACE TEMPORAL HALO FINDER AND THE VELOCITY OFFSETS OF CLUSTER CORES (2011, methodology): “At the same time, an often-overlooked (with the possible exception of Tweed et al. 2009) aspect of halo finding is the extra information stored in the temporal evolution of bound particles.”
Structure finding in cosmological simulations: the state of affairs (2013, background): “…of halo finders: one can use the tracking results to adjust the halo catalogues and remove spurious identification and/or recover missing objects (Springel et al. 2001b; Gill et al. 2004a; Tormen et al. 2004; Giocoli et al. 2008, 2010; Tweed et al. 2009; Behroozi et al. 2013a; Benson et al. 2012).”
Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web (2014, background): “Galaxies are identified with the AdaptaHOP finder (Aubert et al. 2004, updated to its recent version by Tweed et al. 2009 for building merger trees) which directly operates on the distribution of star particles.”
Black hole evolution – I. Supernova-regulated black hole growth (2015, methodology): “We employ the ADAPTAHOP finder (Aubert, Pichon & Colombi 2004; Tweed et al. 2009) on to the distribution of all stars in the simulation.”
Compaction and quenching of high-z galaxies in cosmological simulations: blue and red nuggets (2014, methodology): “These are based on merger trees described in Tweed et al. (2009) and Tweed et al. (in preparation).”
The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure I: Theory and implementation (2010, background): “…as the classical friends-of-friends (FOF) (Huchra & Geller 1982), hierarchical FOF and 6D minimal spanning tree (Gottloeber 1998), SUBFIND (Springel et al. 2001), VOBOZ (Neyrinck, Gnedin & Hamilton 2005) and ADAPTAHOP (Aubert, Pichon & Colombi 2004; Tweed et al. 2009) (the list is not exhaustive).”
A DIRECT MEASUREMENT OF THE BARYONIC MASS FUNCTION OF GALAXIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GALACTIC BARYON FRACTION (2012, methodology): “The identification of subhaloes within haloes is done using the method described in Tweed et al. (2009).”
Self-regulated growth of supermassive black holes by a dual jet-heating active galactic nucleus feedback mechanism: methods, tests and implications for cosmological simulations (2011, methodology): “The procedure is as follows: (i) Galaxies with a minimum of 100 star particles are identified with a galaxy finder based on the Most massive Sub-node Method described in Tweed et al. (2009), which allows for a clean separation of structures and substructures.”
Connecting the cosmic web to the spin of dark haloes: implications for galaxy formation (2012, methodology): “Structures and substructures in dark matter are detected with the Most-massive Sub-node Method (Tweed et al. 2009) and only masses above 5 · 108 M⊙ are selected.”
The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, methodology): “We identify DM haloes and sub-haloes using HaloMaker, which uses AdaptaHOP (Aubert, Pichon & Colombi 2004; Tweed et al. 2009), a structure finder based on the identification of saddle points in the (smoothed) density field.”
Extended Lyman-alpha emission from cold accretion streams (2011, methodology): “We identify halos in our simulation outputs with the AdaptaHOP algorithm from Aubert et al. (2004) and Tweed et al. (2009), where the virial radius of a halo, Rvir, is defined as the radius where the average density is 200 times the critical density of the Universe, and the halo center corresponds…”
Jet-regulated cooling catastrophe (2010, methodology): “Haloes and sub-haloes are identified and followed using the Most massive Sub-node Method (MSM) algorithm described in Tweed et al. (2009), which isolates bound substructures.”
GRAVITATIONALLY CONSISTENT HALO CATALOGS AND MERGER TREES FOR PRECISION COSMOLOGY (2011, background): “…to varying degrees in the literature previously, in particular those issues relating to robust tracking of substructure, see for example Wechsler et al. (2002); Springel (2005); Faltenbacher et al. (2005); Allgood et al. (2006); Harker et al. (2006); Wetzel et al. (2009); Tweed et al. (2009).”
Fluctuating feedback-regulated escape fraction of ionizing radiation in low-mass, high-redshift galaxies (2017, methodology): “The haloes are selected in the final output at z ∼ 5.7 with HaloMaker (Tweed et al. 2009).”
AGN-driven quenching of star formation: morphological and dynamical implications for early-type galaxies (2013, methodology): “…stellar mass Ms is given by the total stellar mass of the central galaxy as detected by the AdaptaHOP algorithm (Aubert, Pichon & Colombi 2004; Tweed et al. 2009) performed on stars, and, thus, captures the stellar content in the core of the halo together with its related intra-cluster light,…”
The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback (2016, background): “Merger trees of galaxies are build with merger tree construction from Tweed et al. (2009) from the catalog of galaxies built on 56 outputs at different times equally spaced in time (∼ 250 Myr).”