CWTHF: Subhalo Identification with Continuous Wavelet Transform

TL;DR

This paper introduces CWTHF, a novel subhalo identification method using continuous wavelet transform, validated on cosmological simulations, offering a robust and efficient way to detect gravitationally bound substructures.

Contribution

The paper extends the CWT framework to subhalo detection with an unbinding procedure, providing a new, efficient, and reliable subhalo finder validated on large cosmological simulations.

Findings

Accurately identifies subhalos in cosmological simulations.

Maintains linear computational complexity of a0O(N).

Outperforms or matches existing subhalo finders in validation tests.

Abstract

With advances in cosmology and computer science, cosmological simulations now resolve structures in increasingly fine detail. As key tracers of hierarchical structure formation, subhalos are among the most important objects within these simulations. In our previous work, we established that the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) can effectively extract clustering information and serve as a robust halo finder. Here, we extend the CWT framework to subhalo identification by adapting the CWTHF (Continuous Wavelet Transform Halo Finder) code. This extension extends the unbinding procedure, which enables the reliable identification of gravitationally bound substructures. The algorithm identifies density peaks within known halos or subhalos and segments the surrounding volume accordingly. Once a new subhalo is registered, its position is recorded to prevent duplicate detection. We validate our approach using the TNG50-2 and TNG100-1 simulations, as well as a single Friends-of-Friends (FOF) halo, by comparing the resulting CWT catalog against the reference SUBFIND catalog. Because the method inherits the original computational framework, our subhalo finder maintains a favorable linear time complexity of $\mathcal{O}(N)$.