Symfind: Addressing the Fragility of Subhalo Finders and Revealing the Durability of Subhalos

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mansfield, Philip, Darragh-Ford, Elise, Wang, Yunchong, Nadler, Ethan O., Wechsler, Risa H.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Mansfield, Philip
Darragh-Ford, Elise
Wang, Yunchong
Nadler, Ethan O.
Wechsler, Risa H.
author_facet Mansfield, Philip
Darragh-Ford, Elise
Wang, Yunchong
Nadler, Ethan O.
Wechsler, Risa H.
contents A major question in $Λ$CDM is what this theory actually predicts for the properties of subhalo populations. Subhalos are difficult to simulate and to find within simulations, and this propagates into uncertainty in theoretical predictions for satellite galaxies. We present Symfind, a new particle-tracking-based subhalo finder, and demonstrate that it can track subhalos to orders-of-magnitude lower masses than commonly used halo-finding tools, with a focus on Rockstar and consistent-trees. These longer survival mean that at a fixed peak subhalo mass, we find $\approx 15\%{-}40\%$ more subhalos within the virial radius, $R_\textrm{vir}$, and $\approx 35\%-120\%$ more subhalos within $R_\textrm{vir}/4$ in the Symphony dark-matter-only simulation suite. More subhalos are found as resolution is increased. We perform extensive numerical testing. In agreement with idealized simulations, we show that the $v_{\rm max}$ of subhalos is only resolved at high resolutions ($n_\textrm{peak}\gtrsim3\times 10^4$), but that mass loss itself can be resolved at much more modest particle counts ($n_\textrm{peak}\gtrsim4\times 10^3$). We show that Rockstar converges to false solutions for the mass function, radial distribution, and disruption masses of subhalos. We argue that our new method can trace resolved subhalos until the point of typical galaxy disruption without invoking ``orphan'' modeling. We outline a concrete set of steps for determining whether other subhalo finders meet the same criteria. We publicly release Symfind catalogs and particle data for the Symphony simulation suite at \url{web.stanford.edu/group/gfc/gfcsims/}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_10926
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Symfind: Addressing the Fragility of Subhalo Finders and Revealing the Durability of Subhalos
Mansfield, Philip
Darragh-Ford, Elise
Wang, Yunchong
Nadler, Ethan O.
Wechsler, Risa H.
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
A major question in $Λ$CDM is what this theory actually predicts for the properties of subhalo populations. Subhalos are difficult to simulate and to find within simulations, and this propagates into uncertainty in theoretical predictions for satellite galaxies. We present Symfind, a new particle-tracking-based subhalo finder, and demonstrate that it can track subhalos to orders-of-magnitude lower masses than commonly used halo-finding tools, with a focus on Rockstar and consistent-trees. These longer survival mean that at a fixed peak subhalo mass, we find $\approx 15\%{-}40\%$ more subhalos within the virial radius, $R_\textrm{vir}$, and $\approx 35\%-120\%$ more subhalos within $R_\textrm{vir}/4$ in the Symphony dark-matter-only simulation suite. More subhalos are found as resolution is increased. We perform extensive numerical testing. In agreement with idealized simulations, we show that the $v_{\rm max}$ of subhalos is only resolved at high resolutions ($n_\textrm{peak}\gtrsim3\times 10^4$), but that mass loss itself can be resolved at much more modest particle counts ($n_\textrm{peak}\gtrsim4\times 10^3$). We show that Rockstar converges to false solutions for the mass function, radial distribution, and disruption masses of subhalos. We argue that our new method can trace resolved subhalos until the point of typical galaxy disruption without invoking ``orphan'' modeling. We outline a concrete set of steps for determining whether other subhalo finders meet the same criteria. We publicly release Symfind catalogs and particle data for the Symphony simulation suite at \url{web.stanford.edu/group/gfc/gfcsims/}.
title Symfind: Addressing the Fragility of Subhalo Finders and Revealing the Durability of Subhalos
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10926