Generating dark matter halo merger trees

By H. Parkinson, Shaun Cole, John C. Helly. 2007

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We present a new Monte Carlo algorithm to generate merger trees describing the formation history of dark matter haloes. The algorithm is a modification of the algorithm of Cole et al. used in the galform semi-analytic galaxy formation model. As such, it is based on the Extended Press–Schechter theory and so should be applicable to hierarchical models with a wide range of power spectra and cosmological models. It is tuned to be in accurate agreement with the conditional mass functions found in the analysis of merger trees extracted from the Λ cold dark matter Millennium N-body simulation. We present a comparison of its predictions not only with these conditional mass functions, but also with additional statistics of the Millennium Simulation halo merger histories. In all cases, we find it to be in good agreement with the Millennium Simulation and thus it should prove to be a very useful tool for semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and for modelling hierarchical structure formation in general. We have made our merger tree generation code and code to navigate the trees available at http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~cole/merger_trees.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c96fb53d3dfb323746e1ddfc85d6b0bf95c70dd7

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Citations in the corpus

Galacticus: A Semi-Analytic Model of Galaxy Formation (2010, methodology): “…(Springel et al., 2005) by Parkinson et al. (2008), while red lines are computed using Galacticus’s merger tree building routines (with the Parkinson et al. (2008) branching algorithm and the Cole et al. (2000) tree building algorithm). et al. (2002) has one free parameter, the formation…”
Testing modified gravity at cosmological distances with LISA standard sirens (2019, methodology): “In more detail, the model follows the evolution of baryonic structures on top of a Dark Matter merger tree produced with an extended Press–Schechter formalism [177], modified to reproduce the results of numerical Nbody simulations [178].”