Stochastic Model of the Spin Distribution of Dark Matter Halos

TL;DR

This paper models the distribution of dark matter halo spins using a stochastic approach, showing that a geometric Brownian motion explains the log-normal distribution and analyzing factors influencing angular momentum changes.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic differential equation framework for halo spin evolution, linking random walks to observed spin distributions across different cosmic environments.

Findings

Spin changes follow a stochastic random walk pattern.

Generated spin distributions match simulations in group and cluster regions.

Log-normal distribution naturally arises from the stochastic model.

Abstract

We employ a stochastic approach to probing the origin of the log-normal distributions of halo spin in N-body simulations. After analyzing spin evolution in halo merging trees, it was found that a spin change can be characterized by a stochastic random walk of angular momentum. Also, spin distributions generated by random walks are fairly consistent with those directly obtained from N-body simulations. We derived a stochastic differential equation from a widely used spin definition and measured the probability distributions of the derived angular momentum change from a massive set of halo merging trees. The roles of major merging and accretion are also statistically analyzed in evolving spin distributions. Several factors (local environment, halo mass, merging mass ratio, and redshift) are found to influence the angular momentum change. The spin distributions generated in the mean-field or void regions tend to shift slightly to a higher spin value compared with simulated spin distributions, which seems to be caused by the correlated random walks. We verified the assumption of randomness in the angular momentum change observed in the N-body simulation and detected several degrees of correlation between walks, which may provide a clue for the discrepancies between the simulated and generated spin distributions in the voids. However, the generated spin distributions in the group and cluster regions successfully match the simulated spin distribution. We also demonstrated that the log-normality of the spin distribution is a natural consequence of the stochastic differential equation of the halo spin, which is well described by the Geometric Brownian Motion model.