Cosmic Web-Halo Connection Between Twin Universes

TL;DR

This study uses twin universe simulations to disentangle the influence of large-scale structure on dark matter halo properties, revealing that environment primarily drives halo spin and shape correlations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel twin universe simulation method to isolate the effects of large-scale environment on halo formation and properties.

Findings

Halo spin aligns with large-scale environment changes.

Large-scale structure predominantly influences halo properties.

Halo spin adjusts with environmental shifts, maintaining correlations.

Abstract

Both simulation and observational data have shown that the spin and shape of dark matter halos are correlated with their nearby large-scale environment. As structure formation on different scales is strongly coupled, it is trick to disentangle the formation of halo with the large-scale environment, making it difficult to infer which is the driving force for the correlation between halo spin/shape with the large-scale structure. In this paper, we use N-body simulation to produce twin Universes that share the same initial conditions on small scales but different on large scales. This is achieved by changing the random seeds for the phase of those k modes smaller than a given scale in the initial conditions. In this way, we are able to disentangle the formation of halo and large-scale structure, making it possible to investigate how halo spin and shape correspond to the change of environment on large scales. We identify matching halo pairs in the twin simulations as those sharing the maximum number of identical particles within each other. Using these matched halo pairs, we study the cross match of halo spin and their correlation with the large-scale structure. It is found that when the large-scale environment changes (eigenvector) between the twin simulations, the halo spin has to rotate accordingly, although not significantly, to maintain the universal correlation seen in each simulation. Our results suggest that the large-scale structure is the main factor to drive the correlation between halo properties and their environment.