DARK MATTER HALO PROFILES OF MASSIVE CLUSTERS: THEORY VERSUS OBSERVATIONS

By Suman Bhattacharya, Salman Habib, Katrin Heitmann, A. Vikhlinin. 2011

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dark-matter-dominated cluster-scale halos act as an important cosmological probe and provide a key testing ground for structure formation theory. Focusing on their mass profiles, we have carried out (gravity-only) simulations of the concordance ΛCDM cosmology, covering a mass range of 2 × 1012 to 2 × 1015 h−1 M☉ and a redshift range of z = 0–2, while satisfying the associated requirements of resolution and statistical control. When fitting to the Navarro–Frenk–White profile, our concentration–mass (c–M) relation differs in normalization and shape in comparison to previous studies that have limited statistics in the upper end of the mass range. We show that the flattening of the c–M relation with redshift is naturally expressed if c is viewed as a function of the peak height parameter, ν. Unlike the c–M relation, the slope of the c–ν relation is effectively constant over the redshift range z = 0–2, while the amplitude varies by ∼30% for massive clusters. This relation is, however, not universal: using a simulation suite covering the allowed wCDM parameter space, we show that the c–ν relation varies by about ±20% as cosmological parameters are varied. At fixed mass, the c(M) distribution is well fit by a Gaussian with σc/〈c〉 ≃ 1/3, independent of the radius at which the concentration is defined, the halo dynamical state, and the underlying cosmology. We compare the ΛCDM predictions with observations of halo concentrations from strong lensing, weak lensing, galaxy kinematics, and X-ray data, finding good agreement for massive clusters (Mvir > 4 × 1014 h−1 M☉), but with some disagreements at lower masses. Because of uncertainty in observational systematics and modeling of baryonic physics, the significance of these discrepancies remains unclear.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d753f3225bce57d5322025c6e93902136f6cd473

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Andrey V. Kravtsov
2. S. Allen
3. A. Mantz
4. H. Ebeling
5. Richard S. Ellis
6. P. Hopkins
7. A. Koekemoer
8. B. Diemer

In Instrumentation

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3. Andrey V. Kravtsov
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7. Massimo Meneghetti
8. A. Koekemoer

Citations in the corpus

• Characterization of subhalo structural properties and implications for dark matter annihilation signals (2016, background): “As we can see, the scatter does not depend on the subhalo position 7 See, however, Reed et al. (2011); Bhattacharya et al. (2013); Diemer & Kravtsov (2014). c© 2016 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–??”
• CLASH: WEAK-LENSING SHEAR-AND-MAGNIFICATION ANALYSIS OF 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2014, methodology): “Here we assume a Gaussian intrinsic scatter of dispersion σc = 0.33c200c as found by Bhattacharya et al. (2013).”
• CLASH-VLT: The mass, velocity-anisotropy, and pseudo-phase-space density profiles of the z = 0.44 galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847 (2013, methodology): “The difference in the cMr of relaxed and unrelaxed halos in simulations suggests that the average eff ct of mergers on concentrations is not very strong (see, e.g., De Boni et al. 2013; Bhattacharya et al. 2013, see also Fig.”
• Weighing the Giants – III. Methods and measurements of accurate galaxy cluster weak-lensing masses (2012, background): “Such large shifts in the massconcentration relation are extreme: Bhattacharya et al. (2013) find that the normalization of the mass-concentration relations from the literature (Neto et al. 2007, for example) and their own workvary by ∼ 10− 20%.”
• COLOSSUS: A Python Toolkit for Cosmology, Large-scale Structure, and Dark Matter Halos (2017, unknown): “…fit, cvir for 3 × 1010 < M < 5 × 1014 h−1 M , z = 0, WMAP7 cosmology prada12 Prada et al. 2012 Fit based on peak height, c200c for any mass, redshift, and cosmology bhattacharya13 Bhattacharya et al. 2013 Power-law fit in ν, c200c, cvir, and c200m for 2 × 1012 < M < 2 × 1015 h−1 M , 0 < z <…”
• A UNIVERSAL MODEL FOR HALO CONCENTRATIONS (2014, methodology): “M relation that is biased high because low concentrations are typical of halos in the rapid mass accretion stage which are more likely to be removed by a relaxation cut (e.g., Neto et al. 2007; Macciò et al. 2008; Bhattacharya et al. 2013; see also the discussion in Section 5.2).”