Coming of Age in the Dark Sector: How Dark Matter Haloes grow their Gravitational Potential Wells

Abstract

We present a detailed study of how dark matter haloes assemble their mass and grow their (central) potential well. We characterize these via their mass accretion histories (MAHs) and potential well growth histories (PWGHs), which we extract from the Bolshoi simulation and from semi-analytical merger trees supplemented with a method to compute the maximum circular velocity, Vmax, of progenitor haloes. The results of both methods are in excellent agreement, both in terms of the average and the scatter. We show that the MAH and PWGH are tightly correlated, and that growth of the central potential precedes the assembly of mass; the maximum circular velocity is already half the present day value by the time the halo has accreted only 2 percent of its final mass. Finally, we demonstrate that MAHs have a universal form, which we use to develop a new and improved universal model that can be used to compute the average or median MAH and PWGH for a halo of any mass in any LCDM cosmology, without having to run a numerical simulation or a set of halo merger trees.

20 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (23)

• Cold streams in early massive hot haloes as the main mode of galaxy formation
• Concentration, Spin and Shape of Dark Matter Haloes as a Function of the Cosmological Model: WMAP1, WMAP3 and WMAP5 results
• Rotation-Dependent Catastrophic Disruption of Gravitational Aggregates
• Generating Dark Matter Halo Merger Trees
• A Revised Model for the Formation of Disk Galaxies: Low Spin and Dark-Halo Expansion
• Natural Downsizing in Hierarchical Galaxy Formation
• On the Lack of Evolution in Galaxy Star Formation Efficiency
• The Nearly Universal Merger Rate of Dark Matter Haloes in Lambda-CDM Cosmology
• The pseudo-evolution of halo mass
• The Population of Dark Matter Subhaloes: Mass Functions and Average Mass Loss Rates
• On Halo Formation Times and Assembly Bias
• The virialized mass of dark matter haloes
• The 12C + 12C reaction and the impact on nucleosynthesis in massive stars
• Merger Rates of Dark-Matter Haloes
• The Dependence of the Mass Assembly History of Cold Dark Matter Halos on Environment
• Constructing Merger Trees that Mimic N-Body Simulations
• An improved model for the formation times of dark matter haloes
• The statistical properties of LCDM halo formation
• Predicting Galaxy Star Formation Rates via the Co-evolution of Galaxies and Halos
• Rhapsody. II. Subhalo Properties and the Impact of Tidal Stripping From a Statistical Sample of Cluster-Size Halos
• Mass distribution and accretion of sub-halos
• Statistics of Dark Matter Substructure: I. Model and Universal Fitting Functions
• Statistics of Dark Matter Substructure: II. Comparison of Model with Simulation Results

Cited by in corpus (46)

• Mass Accretion and its Effects on the Self-Similarity of Gas Profiles in the Outskirts of Galaxy Clusters
• The tidal evolution of dark matter substructure -- II. The impact of artificial disruption on subhalo mass functions and radial profiles
• LoCuSS: Pre-processing in galaxy groups falling into massive galaxy clusters at z=0.2
• Concentrations of Dark Haloes Emerge from Their Merger Histories
• Constraints on the mass-concentration relation of cold dark matter halos with 11 strong gravitational lenses
• Symphony: Cosmological Zoom-in Simulation Suites over Four Decades of Host Halo Mass
• Predicting the density profiles of the first halos
• Constraining Cluster Virialization Mechanism and Cosmology using Thermal-SZ-selected clusters from Future CMB Surveys
• On stellar mass loss from galaxies in groups and clusters
• A Flexible Analytic Model of Cosmic Variance in the First Billion Years
• The Illustris Simulation: Supermassive Black Hole - Galaxy Connection Beyond the Bulge
• Scatter in Sunyaev--Zel'dovich effect scaling relations explained by inter-cluster variance in mass accretion histories
• A Multiwavelength Study of ELAN Environments (AMUSE${}^2$). Mass budget, satellites spin alignment and gas infall in a massive $z\sim 3$ quasar host halo
• The HectoMAP Cluster Survey: Spectroscopically Identified Clusters and their Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs)
• The HectoMAP Redshift Survey: First Data Release
• Orbital distribution of infalling satellite halos across cosmic time
• Predicting fully self-consistent satellite richness, galaxy growth and starformation rates from the STastical sEmi-Empirical modeL STEEL
• Evolution of subhalo orbits in a smoothly-growing host halo potential
• The evolution of compact massive quiescent and starforming galaxies derived from the $R_e-R_h$ and $M_{\mathrm{star}}-M_h$ relations
• Mass accretion rates of clusters of galaxies: CIRS and HeCS
• The galaxy - halo connection in low mass halos
• The effect of dark matter resolution on the collapse of baryons in high redshift numerical simulations
• Testing galaxy formation models with galaxy stellar mass functions
• The Impact of Molecular Hydrogen Cooling on the Galaxy Formation Threshold
• The Velocity Dispersion Function for Quiescent Galaxies in Nine Strong-Lensing Clusters
• Galaxy cluster mass accretion rates from IllustrisTNG
• The weak dependence of velocity dispersion on disk fractions, mass-to-light ratio and redshift: Implications for galaxy and black hole evolution
• Dark Matter Annihilation in the Circumgalactic Medium at High Redshifts
• Probing bursty star formation by cross-correlating extragalactic background light and galaxy surveys
• Dark matter halos and the M-σrelation for supermassive black holes
• The mass accretion history of dark matter haloes down to Earth mass
• Characterizing galaxy clusters by their gravitational potential: systematics of cluster potential reconstruction
• Baryonification extended to thermal Sunyaev Zeldovich
• Mass accretion rates of the HectoMAP clusters of galaxies
• Explaining JWST star formation history at $z\sim 17$ by modifying $\Lambda$CDM
• Accurate Analytic Mass-Scale Relations for Dark Matter Haloes of all Masses and Redshifts
• Modelling the mass accretion histories of dark matter haloes using a Gamma formalism
• Faster than SAM: An empirical model for the tidal evolution of dark matter substructure around strong gravitational lenses
• Subhalo abundance matching using progenitor mass at varying redshift: Two modes of stellar mass growth imprinted into the Subaru HSC galaxy clustering
• The eventful life journey of galaxy clusters. I. Impact of DM halo and ICM properties on their full assembly histories
• Kinematic scaling relations of disc galaxies from ionised gas at $z\sim 1$ and their connection with dark matter haloes
• Modelling the photometric and morphological evolution of disc galaxies in the cluster environment
• The Boosted Potential
• Cosmological evolution of gas and supermassive black holes in idealized isolated halos
• Sound Mode and Scale-Dependent Growth in Two-Fluid Dynamical Dark Energy
• Testing the key role of the stellar mass-halo mass relation in galaxy merger rates and morphologies via DECODE, a novel Discrete statistical sEmi-empiriCal mODEl