Abundance and phase-space distribution of subhalos in cosmological N-body simulations: testing numerical convergence and correction methods

TL;DR

This study assesses the numerical convergence of subhalo properties in large cosmological simulations, demonstrating that including orphan subhalos and correction methods improves accuracy in abundance and distribution measurements.

Contribution

It introduces effective correction techniques for subhalo abundance and spatial distributions, emphasizing the importance of orphan subhalos in achieving convergence in simulations.

Findings

Surviving subhalo peak mass function converges above 5000 particles.

Including orphan subhalos improves accuracy of distributions to 5-10%.

Redshift-space multipoles are more sensitive to small-scale modeling.

Abstract

Subhalos play a crucial role in accurately modeling galaxy formation and galaxy-based cosmological probes within the highly nonlinear, virialized regime. However, numerical convergence of subhalo evolution is difficult to achieve, especially in the inner regions of host halos where tidal forces are strongest. I investigate the numerical convergence and correction methods for the abundance, spatial, and velocity distributions of subhalos using two $6144^3$-particle cosmological N-body simulations with different mass resolutions -- Jiutian-300 ($1.0 \times 10^{7}\,h^{-1}M_{\odot}$) and Jiutian-1G ($3.7 \times 10^{8}\,h^{-1}M_{\odot}$) -- with subhalos identified by HBT+. My study shows that the Surviving subhalo Peak Mass Function (SPMF) converges only for subhalos with $m_{\mathrm{peak}}$ above $5000$ particles but can be accurately recovered by including orphan subhalos that survive according to the merger timescale model of Jiang et al., which outperforms other models. Including orphan subhalos also enables recovery of the real-space spatial and velocity distributions to $5$--$10\%$ accuracy down to scales of $0.1$--$0.2\,h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$. The remaining differences are likely due to cosmic variance and finite-box effects in the smaller Jiutian-300 simulation. Convergence below $0.1\,h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$ remains challenging and requires more sophisticated modeling of orphan subhalos. I further highlight that redshift-space multipoles are more difficult to recover even at larger scales because unreliable small-scale pairs at $r_{\mathrm{p}} < 0.1\,h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$ in real space affect scales of tens of $\mathrm{Mpc}$ in redshift space due to elongated Fingers-of-God effects. Therefore, for redshift-space statistics, I recommend using modified or alternative measures that reduce sensitivity to small projected separations in subhalo-based studies.