DEPENDENCE OF THE OUTER DENSITY PROFILES OF HALOS ON THEIR MASS ACCRETION RATE

By B. Diemer, Andrey V. Kravtsov. 2014

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a systematic study of the density profiles of ΛCDM halos, focusing on the outer regions, 0.1 < r/Rvir < 9. We show that the median and mean profiles of halo samples of a given peak height exhibit significant deviations from the universal analytic profiles discussed previously in the literature, such as the Navarro–Frenk–White and Einasto profiles, at radii r ≳ 0.5R200m. In particular, at these radii the logarithmic slope of the median density profiles of massive or rapidly accreting halos steepens more sharply than predicted. The steepest slope of the profiles occurs at r ≈ R200m, and its absolute value increases with increasing peak height or mass accretion rate, reaching slopes of −4 and steeper. Importantly, we find that the outermost density profiles at r ≳ R200m are remarkably self-similar when radii are rescaled by R200m. This self-similarity indicates that radii defined with respect to the mean density are preferred for describing the structure and evolution of the outer profiles. However, the inner density profiles are most self-similar when radii are rescaled by R200c. We propose a new fitting formula that describes the median and mean profiles of halo samples selected by their peak height or mass accretion rate with accuracy ≲ 10% at all radii, redshifts, and masses we studied, r ≲ 9Rvir, 0 < z < 6, and Mvir > 1.7 × 1010 h−1 M☉. We discuss observational signatures of the profile features described above and show that the steepening of the outer profile should be detectable in future weak-lensing analyses of massive clusters. Such observations could be used to estimate the mass accretion rate of cluster halos.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d130083d7e14a6260c076805b545d9c253a03573

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “There is no universal choice for ∆, with different choices having different physical motivation [133] though the variation is only a factor of a few.”
THE SPLASHBACK RADIUS AS A PHYSICAL HALO BOUNDARY AND THE GROWTH OF HALO MASS (2015, methodology): “8 1.5 200m» - (Diemer & Kravtsov 2014).”
A UNIVERSAL MODEL FOR HALO CONCENTRATIONS (2014, methodology): “While using the Diemer & Kravtsov (2014) profile improves the estimates by a few percent, the bulk of the effect is not caused by a deviation of the NFW profile from the true median profile.”
CLASH: WEAK-LENSING SHEAR-AND-MAGNIFICATION ANALYSIS OF 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2014, background): “Figure 10 shows that the two samples have very similar outer mass profiles at R >∼ 1 Mpch−1 ∼ 0.5rvir, which are sensitive to the underlying mass accretion rate or halo peak height (Diemer & Kravtsov 2014).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing mass calibration of redMaPPer galaxy clusters (2018, methodology): “This was due to our use of the Diemer & Kravtsov (2014) M–c relation.”
A volumetric deep Convolutional Neural Network for simulation of dark matter halo catalogues (2018, background): “…N-body simulations calculate the true dynamics of collisionless cold dark matter particles, dark matter haloes are dynamic objects with complicated morphologies (Diemer & Kravtsov 2014; Adhikari et al. 2014), and typical Eulerian space halo finders suffer from this uncertainty in their definition.”
CLASH: JOINT ANALYSIS OF STRONG-LENSING, WEAK-LENSING SHEAR, AND MAGNIFICATION DATA FOR 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2015, methodology): “The halo-model interpretation we have adopted is a crude approximation in the transition between the intra-halo and two-halo regimes, neglecting nonlinear effects (Baldauf et al. 2010; Diemer & Kravtsov 2014).”