Virial halo mass function in the ${\it Planck}$ cosmology

TL;DR

This study provides a high-precision calibration of the halo mass function in the Planck cosmology using N-body simulations, improving modeling accuracy for galaxy formation and dark matter constraints.

Contribution

We present a new four-parameter model for the halo mass function calibrated with high-resolution simulations under Planck cosmology, including redshift evolution and improved accuracy.

Findings

The model fits halo mass functions with 5% precision across a wide mass and redshift range.

Sheth & Tormen overestimates halo abundance at high redshift and low mass by 20-30%.

WDM lighter than 2.71 keV is inconsistent with observed galaxy counts at z=6.

Abstract

We study halo mass functions with high-resolution $N$-body simulations under a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. Our simulations adopt the cosmological model that is consistent with recent measurements of the cosmic microwave backgrounds with the ${\it Planck}$ satellite. We calibrate the halo mass functions for $10^{8.5} \lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} M_\mathrm{vir} / (h^{-1}M_\odot) \lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} 10^{15.0 - 0.45 \, z}$, where $M_\mathrm{vir}$ is the virial spherical overdensity mass and redshift $z$ ranges from $0$ to $7$. The halo mass function in our simulations can be fitted by a four-parameter model over a wide range of halo masses and redshifts, while we require some redshift evolution of the fitting parameters. Our new fitting formula of the mass function has a 5\%-level precision except for the highest masses at $z\le 7$. Our model predicts that the analytic prediction in Sheth $\&$ Tormen would overestimate the halo abundance at $z=6$ with $M_\mathrm{vir} = 10^{8.5-10}\, h^{-1}M_\odot$ by $20-30\%$. Our calibrated halo mass function provides a baseline model to constrain warm dark matter (WDM) by high-$z$ galaxy number counts. We compare a cumulative luminosity function of galaxies at $z=6$ with the total halo abundance based on our model and a recently proposed WDM correction. We find that WDM with its mass lighter than $2.71\, \mathrm{keV}$ is incompatible with the observed galaxy number density at a $2\sigma$ confidence level.