ASOHF: a new adaptive spherical overdensity halo finder

TL;DR

The paper introduces ASOHF, an adaptive spherical overdensity halo finder designed for cosmological simulations, capable of identifying dark matter haloes and subhaloes efficiently, especially suited for adaptive mesh refinement codes.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel adaptive spherical overdensity halo finder (ASOHF) optimized for AMR codes and halo merger tree construction, with validation tests and comparison to existing methods.

Findings

Successfully identifies haloes and subhaloes down to simulation limits.

Performs well in tests and compares favorably with other halo finders.

Optimized for adaptive mesh refinement cosmological simulations.

Abstract

We present and test a new halo finder based on the spherical overdensity (SO) method. This new adaptive spherical overdensity halo finder (ASOHF) is able to identify dark matter haloes and their substructures (subhaloes) down to the scales allowed by the analysed simulations. The code has been especially designed for the adaptive mesh refinement cosmological codes, although it can be used as a stand-alone halo finder for N-body codes. It has been optimised for the purpose of building the merger tree of the haloes. In order to verify the viability of this new tool, we have developed a set of bed tests that allows us to estimate the performance of the finder. Finally, we apply the halo finder to a cosmological simulation and compare the results obtained to those given by other well known publicly available halo finders.