Dark-ages Reionization & Galaxy Formation Simulation VIII. Suppressed growth of dark matter halos during the Epoch of Reionization

Abstract

We investigate how the hydrostatic suppression of baryonic accretion affects the growth rate of dark matter halos during the Epoch of Reionization. By comparing halo properties in a simplistic hydrodynamic simulation in which gas only cools adiabatically, with its collisionless equivalent, we find that halo growth is slowed as hydrostatic forces prevent gas from collapsing. In our simulations, at the high redshifts relevant for reionization (between $\sim 6$ and $\sim 11$), halos that host dwarf galaxies ($\lesssim 10^9{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) can be reduced by up to a factor of 2 in mass due to the hydrostatic pressure of baryons. Consequently, the inclusion of baryonic effects reduces the amplitude of the low mass tail of the halo mass function by factors of 2 to 4. In addition, we find that the fraction of baryons in dark matter halos hosting dwarf galaxies at high redshift never exceeds $\sim 90\%$ of the cosmic baryon fraction. When implementing baryonic processes, including cooling, star formation, supernova feedback and reionization, the suppression effects become more significant with further reductions of $\sim 30\%$ to 60\%. Although convergence tests suggest that the suppression may become weaker in higher resolution simulations, this suppressed growth will be important for semi-analytic models of galaxy formation, in which the halo mass inherited from an underlying N-body simulation directly determines galaxy properties. Based on the adiabatic simulation, we provide tables to account for these effects in N-body simulations, and present a modification of the halo mass function along with explanatory analytic calculations.

17 pages, 11 figures; Updated to match the published version. Two changes in Figures 1 and 3 in order to 1) correct bin sizes of the 10^8 and 10^8.5 Msol bins for NOSN_NOZCOOL_NoRe (was 0.5, should be 0.25); 2) include stellar mass in baryon fraction (was missed in Fig. 3). Quantitative description of Fig. 3 changed slightly in Section 2.2. All other results and conclusions remain unchanged

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Convergence properties of halo merger trees; halo and substructure merger rates across cosmic history
• NIHAO-XXIII: Dark Matter density shaped by Black Hole feedback
• The Normalization and Slope of the Dark Matter (Sub-)Halo Mass Function on Sub-Galactic Scales
• The AGORA High-resolution Galaxy Simulations Comparison Project. V: Satellite Galaxy Populations In A Cosmological Zoom-in Simulation of A Milky Way-mass Halo
• Dark-ages reionization and galaxy formation simulation - IX. Economics of reionizing galaxies
• The influence of baryons on low-mass haloes
• Merger Tree-based Galaxy Matching: A Comparative Study Across Different Resolutions