Testing tidal-torque theory: I. spin amplitude and direction

By C. Porciani, A. Dekel, Y. Hoffman. 2001

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We evaluate the success of linear tidal-torque theory (TTT) in predicting galactic-halo spin using a cosmological N-body simulation with thousands of well-resolved haloes. The protohaloes are identified by tracing today's haloes back to the initial conditions. The TTT predictions for the protohaloes match, on average, the spin amplitudes of the virialized haloes of today, if linear growth is assumed until ∼t0/3, or 55–70 per cent of the halo effective turn-around time. This makes it a useful qualitative tool for understanding certain average properties of galaxies, such as total spin and angular momentum distribution within haloes, but with a random scatter of the order of the signal itself. Non-linear changes in spin direction cause a mean error of ∼50° in the TTT prediction at t0, such that the linear spatial correlations of spins on scales ≥1 h−1 Mpc are significantly weakened by non-linear effects. This questions the usefulness of TTT for predicting intrinsic alignments in the context of gravitational lensing. We find that the standard approximations made in TTT, including a second-order expansion of the Zel'dovich potential and a smoothing of the tidal field, provide close-to-optimal results.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f00ac22499d5f5a8e8d37759375afee88e399614

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

The alignment between the distribution of satellites and the orientation of their central galaxy (2006, background): “…are oriented with respect to their surrounding large scale structure, the alignment on these two different scales may well be very different (see e.g., Barnes & Efstathiou 1987; Porciani et al. 2002a,b; Navarro, Abadi & Steinmetz 2004; Bailin & Steinmetz 2005; Trujillo, Carretero & Patiri 2005).”
The Causes of Halo Shape Changes Induced by Cooling Baryons: Disks versus Substructures (2007, background): “This orientation is a natural one for disks to form in since simulations have shown that the angular momenta of halos are aligned with their minor axes (e.g. Warren et al. 1992; Porciani et al. 2002; Faltenbacher et al. 2005).”
Properties of dark matter haloes in clusters, filaments, sheets and voids (2006, background): “This dependence, presumably, has its origin in the tidal-torque history of the haloes which likely correlates with the specific eigenstructure of the tidal field at the final halo position (Bond et al. 1996; Porciani et al. 2002a; Porciani, Dekel & Hoffman 2002b).”
Potential sources of contamination to weak lensing measurements: constraints from N-body simulations (2006, background): “(2006)), analytically (Catelan et al. 2001; Crittenden et al. 2001; Lee & Pen 2001; Porciani et al. 2002; Mackey et al. 2002) and through numerical simulations (Heavens et al. (2000), hereafter HRH, Croft & Metzler (2000); Jing (2002), H04), it is currently thought that this intrinsic alignment…”
The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, methodology): “elative to the power spectrum. Other investigations of intrinsic alignment in dark matter only simulations have also been carried out, for example, by Dekel et al. (2001); Faltenbacher et al. (2002); Porciani et al. (2002a,b); Aubert et al. (2004); Hopkins et al. (2005); Lee et al. (2005); Altay et ”
The evolution of dark matter halo properties in clusters, filaments, sheets and voids (2007, methodology): “We finally compute the spin-spin and spin-orbit correlation functions using the definitions of Porciani et al. (2002) and Bailin & Steinmetz (2005).”
The spin and shape of dark matter haloes in the Millennium simulation of a Λ cold dark matter universe (2006, methodology): “However, as work such as that of White (1984) and Porciani et al. (2002) has shown, the non-linear effects inherent in the formation of large-scale structure lead to large quantitative disagreements between the predictions of the tidal torque theory and the angular momenta found in N-body…”
Four phases of angular-momentum buildup in high-z galaxies: from cosmic-web streams through an extended ring to disc and bulge (2014, methodology): “(6) It has been confirmed in N-body simulations (Porciani et al. 2002a,b) that the acquisition of AM significantly slows down once the protohalo reaches maximum expansion, at twice its current virial radius according to the spherical collapse model, after which it turns around and collapses to the…”
Spin alignments within the cosmic web: a theory of constrained tidal torques near filaments (2015, background): “First, because Equation (1) is only valid in the linear regime (Porciani et al. 2002), but possibly more importantly because we take the Hessian as a proxy for the inertia tensor.”
Connecting the cosmic web to the spin of dark haloes: implications for galaxy formation (2012, background): “…web described in the main text (Section 1), the only numerical study to date looking at the alignment between halo spin and tidal tensor was done by Porciani et al. (2002) who predicted its orthogonality with the major principal axis but also found that galactic spins must have lost their initial…”
Orbital parameters of merging dark matter halos (2003, unknown): “These models and models in which angular momentum is acquired by tidal torques e.g. Porciani et al. (2002) reproduce the spin distribution of halos found in N-body simulations.”
Internal and External Alignment of the Shapes and Angular Momenta of ΛCDM Halos (2004, methodology): “Linear tidal torque theory (Doroshkevich 1970; White 1984) can be used to predict the directions of the angular momentum vectors and their correlations with the surrounding structure (Pen et al. 2000; Lee & Pen 2000, 2001; Crittenden et al. 2001; Porciani et al. 2002a,b).”