The universal mass accretion history of cold dark matter haloes

By F. V. D. Bosch. 2001

244 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use the extended Press-Schechter formalism to investigate the rate at which cold dark matter haloes accrete mass. We discuss the shortcomings of previous methods that have been used to compute the mass accretion histories of dark matter haloes, and present an improved method based on the N-branch merger tree algorithm of Somerville & Kolatt. We show that this method no longer suffers from inconsistencies in halo formation times, and compare its predictions with high-resolution N-body simulations. Although the overall agreement is reasonable, there are slight inconsistencies which are most easily interpreted as a reflection of ellipsoidal collapse (as opposed to spherical collapse assumed in the Press-Schechter formalism). We show that the average mass accretion histories follow a simple, universal profile, and we present a simple recipe for computing the two scale-parameters which is applicable to a wide range of halo masses and cosmologies. Together with the universal profiles for the density and angular momentum distributions of cold dark matter haloes, these universal mass accretion histories provide a simple but accurate framework for modelling the structure and formation of dark matter haloes. In particular, they can be used as a backbone for modelling various aspects of galaxy formation where one is not interested in the detailed effects of merging. As an example we use the universal mass accretion history to compute the rate at which dark matter haloes accrete mass, which we compare with the cosmic star formation history of the Universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e34e3bad98235eee712e08a32852a0f9aea46cee

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Citations in the corpus

Concentration, spin and shape of dark matter haloes as a function of the cosmological model: WMAP1, WMAP3 and WMAP5 results (2008, background): “This implies that dark matter haloes of a given mass assemble later (e.g., van den Bosch 2001).”
A unified multiwavelength model of galaxy formation (2015, background): “The motivation for universal mass accretion histories comes from the extended PressSchechter theory (Lacey & Cole 1993; van den Bosch 2002).”
Resolving cosmic structure formation with the Millennium-II simulation (2009, background): “…history of a 12 for a discussion of the statistical properties of mass accretion histories, see Lacey & Cole (1993); Wechsler et al. (2002); van den Bosch (2002); Zhao et al. (2003b,a, 2008); McBride et al. (2009). c© 2009 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–16 halo as the mass of its main progenitor M(z) at each…”
The accretion history of dark matter haloes - III. A physical model for the concentration-mass relation (2015, methodology): “M model used MAHs from van den Bosch (2002) and Zhao et al. (2009) to show specific examples on how to construct a c(M, z) relation for a given MAH, but any MAH model can be used.”
ACCURATE UNIVERSAL MODELS FOR THE MASS ACCRETION HISTORIES AND CONCENTRATIONS OF DARK MATTER HALOS (2008, methodology): “…dependence on the shape of the power spectrum in our empirical model is actually different from that given by the extended PS theory, as demonstrated clearly by the discrepancy between our results and the model of van den Bosch (2002), which is based on the extended PS theory (see Figures 10–12).”
The mass function and average mass-loss rate of dark matter subhaloes (2004, methodology): “Such a parent halo mass dependence might be expected from the fact that more massive haloes form later (e.g. van den Bosch 2002), thus leaving less time for mass loss to operate.”