On the universality of density profiles

TL;DR

This study uses an advanced infall model to analyze how the inner density slopes of dark matter halos vary with mass and redshift, challenging the idea of universal density profiles.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model including baryonic effects to show that density profiles are not universal but depend on halo mass and redshift.

Findings

Inner slopes range from 0 to 0.94 depending on halo mass.

Slopes increase with redshift, more so in larger halos.

Dark matter only profiles show minimal dependence on mass and redshift.

Abstract

We use the secondary infall model described in Del Popolo (2009), which takes into account the effect of dynamical friction, ordered and random angular momentum, baryons adiabatic contraction and dark matter baryons interplay, to study how in- ner slopes of relaxed LCDM dark matter (DM) halos with and without baryons (baryons+DM, and pure DM) depend on redshift and on halo mass. We apply the quoted method to structures on galactic scales and clusters of galaxies scales. We find that the inner logarithmic density slope, of dark matter halos with baryons has a significant dependence on halo mass and redshift with slopes ranging from 0 for dwarf galaxies to 0.4 for objects of M = 10^13M_solar and 0.94 for M = 10^15M_solar clusters of galaxies. Structures slopes increase with increasing redshift and this trend reduces going from galaxies to clusters. In the case of density profiles constituted just of dark matter the mass and redshift dependence of slope is very slight. In this last case, we used the Merrit et al. (2006) analysis who compared N-body density profiles with various parametric models finding systematic variation in profile shape with halo mass. This last analysis suggests that the galaxy-sized halos obtained with our model have a different shape parameter, i.e. a different mass distribution, than the cluster-sized halos, obtained with the same model. The results of the present paper argue against universality of density profiles constituted by dark matter and baryons and confirm claims of a systematic variation in profile shape with halo mass, for dark matter halos.