Dark matter halo merger histories beyond cold dark matter – I. Methods and application to warm dark matter

By A. Benson, A. Farahi, Shaun Cole, L. A. Moustakas, Adrian Jenkins, M. Lovell, R. Kennedy, John C. Helly, Carlos Frenk Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena and 13 more. 2012

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe a methodology to accurately compute halo mass functions, progenitor mass functions, merger rates and merger trees in non-cold dark matter universes using a self-consistent treatment of the generalized extended Press–Schechter formalism. Our approach permits rapid exploration of the subhalo population of galactic haloes in dark matter models with a variety of different particle properties or universes with rolling, truncated or more complicated power spectra. We make detailed comparisons of analytically derived mass functions and merger histories with recent warm dark matter cosmological N-body simulations, and find excellent agreement. We show that once the accretion of smoothly distributed matter is accounted for, coarse-grained statistics such as the mass accretion history of haloes can be almost indistinguishable between cold and warm dark matter cases. However, the halo mass function and progenitor mass functions differ significantly, with the warm dark matter cases being strongly suppressed below the free-streaming scale of the dark matter. We demonstrate the importance of using the correct solution for the excursion set barrier first-crossing distribution in warm dark matter – if the solution for a flat barrier is used instead, the truncation of the halo mass function is much slower, leading to an overestimate of the number of low-mass haloes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dae4380ae32775834f80c8cb624d37831000d9a9

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, unknown): “One can then either i) run simulations [194, 219, 1268, 1222, 335, 1209, 1056, 161, 68, 1073], ii) use the halo model [1107, 1056, 437] or iii) a fit analogous to Equation 2.”
“Non-cold” dark matter at small scales: a general approach (2017, methodology): “1), which is the theoretical subhalo mass function derived by an extended Press-Schechter approach [80, 81] based on a sharp-k window [82, 83].”
WHY BARYONS MATTER: THE KINEMATICS OF DWARF SPHEROIDAL SATELLITES (2012, background): “The primarily effect of WDM is to erase substructure below the free-streaming scale (Angulo et al. 2013; Benson et al. 2013).”
Galaxy UV-luminosity function and reionization constraints on axion dark matter (2014, methodology): “This is consistent with what is found from an excursion-set calculation by Benson et al. (2013) applied to WDM at the WDM Jeans scale.”
The warm dark matter halo mass function below the cut-off scale (2013, methodology): “This difference relative to CDM is expected to affect the abundance of collapsed objects (DM haloes) below the cut-off mass scale1 (e.g. Schneider et al. 2012; Menci et al. 2012; Benson et al. 2013), and also the internal properties of haloes (Coĺın et al. 2000, e.g.).”
The properties of warm dark matter haloes (2013, background): “Further theoretical work, including simulations and semi-analytical calculations (Benson et al. 2013; Kennedy et al. 2013) combined with better data for dwarf galaxies offer the prospect of ruling out or validating these models.”
The mass–concentration–redshift relation of cold and warm dark matter haloes (2016, background): “…accurately reproduce not only the evolution of the main progenitor halo (e.g. van den Bosch 2002; Jiang & van den Bosch 2014; Correa et al. 2015a,b), but the entire hierarchy of progenitors for both CDM (e.g. Parkinson, Cole & Helly 2008) and WDM (e.g. Benson et al. 2013) fluctuation power spectra.”