Halo Assembly Bias in the Quasi-linear Regime

TL;DR

This study investigates whether assembly bias exists in the quasi-linear regime using a simplified dynamical model, finding that assembly bias is present and correlates with early structure formation, consistent with full N-body simulations.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that assembly bias can be captured using the punctuated Zel'dovich approximation, a simplified model, showing its presence without highly non-linear effects.

Findings

Assembly bias is comparable to full N-body simulations.

Older halos are 3-5 times more correlated than younger ones at certain masses.

Halo ages correlate with the linear structure's dimensionality.

Abstract

We address the question of whether or not assembly bias arises in the absence of highly non-linear effects such as tidal stripping of halos near larger mass concentrations. Therefore, we use a simplified dynamical scheme where these effects are not modeled. We choose the punctuated Zel'dovich (PZ) approximation, which prevents orbit mixing by coalescing particles coming within a critical distance of each other. A numerical implementation of this approximation is fast, allowing us to run a large number of simulations to study assembly bias. We measure an assembly bias from 60 PZ simulations, each with 512^3 cold particles in a 128h^-1 Mpc cubic box. The assembly bias estimated from the correlation functions at separations < 5h^-1 Mpc for objects (halos) at z=0 is comparable to that obtained in full N-body simulations. For masses 4x10^11 h^-1 Mo the "oldest" 10% haloes are 3-5 times more correlated than the "youngest" 10%. The bias weakens with increasing mass, also in agreement with full N-body simulations. We find that that halo ages are correlated with the dimensionality of the surrounding linear structures as measured by the parameter (\lambda_1+\lambda_2+\lambda_3)/ (\lambda_1^2+\lambda_2^2+\lambda_3^2)^{1/2} where \lambda_i are proportional to the eigenvalues of the velocity deformation tensor. Our results suggest that assembly bias may already be encoded in the early stages of the evolution.