Environmental Effects of Dark Matter Haloes: The Clustering-Substructure relation of Group-size Haloes

TL;DR

This study investigates how the presence of substructure in dark matter haloes correlates with their clustering behavior and environment, revealing that haloes with substructure are more clustered and located in denser regions across different epochs.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the clustering-substructure relation of group-size dark matter haloes using large LCDM simulations and observationally driven substructure identification methods.

Findings

Haloes with substructure are more clustered than those without.

Substructured haloes are found in higher-density environments.

The correlation length increases with the amount of substructure.

Abstract

We estimate the two-point correlation function of dark matter haloes, with masses >10^{13} h^{-1} Mo, that have or not significant substructure. The haloes are identified with a friends of friends algorithm in a large LCDM simulation at two redshift snapshots (z=0 and 1), while halo substructure is determined using an observationally driven method. We find in both epochs a clear and significant signal by which haloes with substructure are more clustered than those with no-substructure. This is true for all the considered halo mass ranges, although for the highest halo masses the signal is noisy and present only out to ~20 h^{-1} Mpc. There is also a smooth increase of the halo correlation length with increasing amplitude of the halo substructure. We also find that substructured haloes are typically located in high-density large-scale environments, while the opposite is true for non-substructured haloes. If the haloes found in high-density regions have a relatively earlier formation time, as suggested by recent works, then they do indeed have more time to cluster than haloes, of a similar mass, which form later in the low-density regions. In such a case one would have naively expected that the former (earlier formed) haloes would typically be dynamically more relaxed than the latter (later formed). However, the higher merging and interaction rate,expected in high-density regions, could disrupt their relatively relaxed dynamical state and thus be the cause for the higher fraction of haloes with substructure found in such regions.