The quasi-adiabatic relaxation of haloes in the IllustrisTNG and EAGLE cosmological simulations

TL;DR

This study characterizes how dark matter haloes in the IllustrisTNG and EAGLE simulations respond to galaxy and gas effects, providing new fitting functions that improve modeling of halo relaxation across a wide mass range.

Contribution

It introduces a refined quasi-adiabatic relaxation model that accounts for halo-centric distance and feedback effects, surpassing previous simplistic schemes.

Findings

Dark matter response depends on halo-centric distance and is consistent across simulations.

Common models underestimate the complexity of halo relaxation behavior.

Shells with no apparent relaxation can still have significant mass changes due to feedback.

Abstract

The dark matter content of a gravitationally bound halo is known to be affected by the galaxy and gas it hosts. We characterise this response for haloes spanning over four orders of magnitude in mass in the hydrodynamical simulation suites IllustrisTNG and EAGLE. We present simple fitting functions in the spherically averaged quasi-adiabatic relaxation framework that accurately capture the dark matter response over the full range of halo mass and halo-centric distance we explore. We show that commonly employed schemes, which consider the relative change in radius $r_f/r_i-1$ of a spherical dark matter shell to be a function of only the relative change in its mass $M_i/M_f-1$, do not accurately describe the measured response of most haloes in IllustrisTNG and EAGLE. Rather, $r_f/r_i$ additionally explicitly depends upon halo-centric distance $r_f/R_{\rm vir}$ for haloes with virial radius $R_{\rm vir}$, being very similar between IllustrisTNG and EAGLE and across halo mass. We also account for a previously unmodelled effect, likely driven by feedback-related outflows, in which shells having $r_f/r_i\simeq1$ (i.e., no relaxation) have $M_i/M_f$ significantly different from unity. Our results are immediately applicable to a number of semi-analytical tools for modelling galactic and large-scale structure. We also study the dependence of this response on several halo and galaxy properties beyond total mass, finding that it is primarily related to halo concentration and star formation rate. We discuss possible extensions of these results to build a deeper physical understanding of the small-scale connection between dark matter and baryons.