Cosmic Emulation: The Concentration-Mass Relation for wCDM Universes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cosmic emulator for the concentration-mass relation in wCDM universes, enabling accurate predictions across various cosmologies, masses, and redshifts, with implications for understanding structure formation.

Contribution

A novel, simulation-based emulator for the c-M relation in wCDM models, covering a broad mass and redshift range, and accounting for cosmological parameter variations.

Findings

The emulator predicts halo concentration varies from 2 to 8.

Concentration distribution at fixed mass is Gaussian with one-third standard deviation.

Cosmological parameters like _8, _m, and w significantly affect the c-M relation.

Abstract

The concentration-mass relation for dark matter-dominated halos is one of the essential results expected from a theory of structure formation. We present a simple prediction scheme, a cosmic emulator, for the c-M relation as a function of cosmological parameters for wCDM models. The emulator is constructed from 37 individual models, with three nested N-body gravity-only simulations carried out for each model. The mass range covered by the emulator is 2 x 10^{12} M_sun < M <10^{15} M_sun with a corresponding redshift range of z=0 -1. Over this range of mass and redshift, as well as the variation of cosmological parameters studied, the mean halo concentration varies from c ~ 2 to c ~ 8. The distribution of the concentration at fixed mass is Gaussian with a standard deviation of one-third of the mean value, almost independent of cosmology, mass, and redshift over the ranges probed by the simulations. We compare results from the emulator with previously derived heuristic analytic fits for the c-M relation, finding that they underestimate the halo concentration at high masses. Using the emulator to investigate the cosmology dependence of the c-M relation over the currently allowable range of values, we find -- not surprisingly -- that \sigma_8 and \omega_m influence it considerably, but also that the dark energy equation of state parameter, w, has a substantial effect. In general, the concentration of lower-mass halos is more sensitive to changes in cosmological parameters as compared to cluster mass halos.