The Cosmogrid Simulation: Statistical Properties of Small Dark Matter Halos

TL;DR

The Cosmogrid simulation suite models small dark matter halos in a cosmological context, revealing detailed properties of halo mass functions, density profiles, concentration, spin, and subhalo abundance, consistent with theoretical predictions.

Contribution

This study provides high-resolution simulation data on small dark matter halos, extending understanding of their statistical properties and testing theoretical models against detailed numerical results.

Findings

Halo mass function agrees with Sheth & Tormen down to 10^7 Msun.

Inner density profiles are shallower than -1 slope.

Halo concentration correlates with mass, fitting a modified Press-Schechter model.

Abstract

We present the results of the "Cosmogrid" cosmological N-body simulation suites based on the concordance LCDM model. The Cosmogrid simulation was performed in a 30Mpc box with 2048^3 particles. The mass of each particle is 1.28x10^5 Msun, which is sufficient to resolve ultra-faint dwarfs. We found that the halo mass function shows good agreement with the Sheth & Tormen fitting function down to ~10^7 Msun. We have analyzed the spherically averaged density profiles of the three most massive halos which are of galaxy group size and contain at least 170 million particles. The slopes of these density profiles become shallower than -1 at the inner most radius. We also find a clear correlation of halo concentration with mass. The mass dependence of the concentration parameter cannot be expressed by a single power law, however a simple model based on the Press-Schechter theory proposed by Navarro et al. gives reasonable agreement with this dependence. The spin parameter does not show a correlation with the halo mass. The probability distribution functions for both concentration and spin are well fitted by the log-normal distribution for halos with the masses larger than ~10^8 Msun. The subhalo abundance depends on the halo mass. Galaxy-sized halos have 50% more subhalos than ~10^{11} Msun halos have.