Alignments of dark matter halos with large-scale tidal fields: mass and redshift dependence

TL;DR

This study examines how dark matter halo shapes and spins align with the cosmic web, revealing dependencies on mass, redshift, and the nonlinear evolution of structures, with implications for understanding galaxy alignments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of halo-tidal field alignments across mass and redshift, incorporating projection effects for observational comparison and linking alignments to large-scale tidal coherence.

Findings

Halo axes align with tidal axes, with alignment strength increasing with mass and redshift.

Halo spin tends to be parallel to intermediate axes and perpendicular to major axes of tidal field.

Alignment strength decreases with nonlinear evolution, remaining constant in quasi-linear regimes.

Abstract

Large scale tidal field estimated directly from the distribution of dark matter halos is used to investigate how halo shapes and spin vectors are aligned with the cosmic web. The major, intermediate and minor axes of halos are aligned with the corresponding tidal axes, and halo spin axes tend to be parallel with the intermediate axes and perpendicular to the major axes of tidal field. The strengths of these alignments generally increase with halo mass and redshift, but the dependencies are only through the peak height, {\nu}. The scaling relations of the alignment strengths with the value of {\nu} indicate that the alignment strengths remain roughly constant when the structures within which the halos reside are still in quasi-linear regime, but decreases as nonlinear evolution becomes more important. We also calculate the alignments in projection so that our results can be compared directly with observations. Finally, we investigate the alignments of tidal tensors on large scales, and use the results to understand alignments of halo pairs separated at various distances. Our results suggest coherent structure of the tidal field is the underlying reason for the alignments of halos and galaxies seen in numerical simulations and in observations.