Constructing high-fidelity halo merger trees in AbacusSummit

Abstract

Tracking the formation and evolution of dark matter haloes is a critical aspect of any analysis of cosmological $N$-body simulations. In particular, the mass assembly of a halo and its progenitors, encapsulated in the form of its merger tree, serves as a fundamental input for constructing semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and, more generally, for building mock catalogues that emulate galaxy surveys. We present an algorithm for constructing halo merger trees from AbacusSummit, the largest suite of cosmological $N$-body simulations performed to date consisting of nearly 60 trillion particles, and which has been designed to meet the Cosmological Simulation Requirements of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. Our method tracks the cores of haloes to determine associations between objects across multiple timeslices, yielding lists of halo progenitors and descendants for the several tens of billions of haloes identified across the entire suite. We present an application of these merger trees as a means to enhance the fidelity of AbacusSummit halo catalogues by flagging and "merging" haloes deemed to exhibit non-monotonic past merger histories. We show that this cleaning technique identifies portions of the halo population that have been deblended due to choices made by the halo finder, but which could have feasibly been part of larger aggregate systems. We demonstrate that by cleaning halo catalogues in this post-processing step, we remove potentially unphysical features in the default halo catalogues, leaving behind a more robust halo population that can be used to create highly-accurate mock galaxy realisations from AbacusSummit.

arXiv comment19 pages, 13 figures, 2 table. Accepted for publication in MNRAS; updated one citation

References in corpus (60)

• SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python
• Simulating the joint evolution of quasars, galaxies and their large-scale distribution
• The many lives of active galactic nuclei: cooling flows, black holes and the luminosities and colours of galaxies
• LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
• Populating a cluster of galaxies - I. Results at z=0
• dynesty: A Dynamic Nested Sampling Package for Estimating Bayesian Posteriors and Evidences
• SDSS-III: Massive Spectroscopic Surveys of the Distant Universe, the Milky Way Galaxy, and Extra-Solar Planetary Systems
• The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III
• Hierarchical Galaxy Formation
• The Rockstar Phase-Space Temporal Halo Finder and the Velocity Offsets of Cluster Cores
• A Semi-Analytic Model for the Co-evolution of Galaxies, Black Holes, and Active Galactic Nuclei
• Wide-Field InfrarRed Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets WFIRST-AFTA 2015 Report
• Halo occupation numbers and galaxy bias
• Halos and galaxies in the standard cosmological model: results from the Bolshoi simulation
• The Halo Occupation Distribution: Towards an Empirical Determination of the Relation Between Galaxies and Mass
• Theoretical Models of the Halo Occupation Distribution: Separating Central and Satellite Galaxies
• Ahf: Amiga's Halo Finder
• The Connection between Galaxies and their Dark Matter Halos
• Merger rates in hierarchical models of galaxy formation. II: Comparison with N-body simulations
• Galaxy formation in the Planck Cosmology - I. Matching the observed evolution of star formation rates, colours and stellar masses
• Spectral Classification and Redshift Measurement for the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
• Gravitationally Consistent Halo Catalogs and Merger Trees for Precision Cosmology
• The Nature of Galaxy Bias and Clustering
• Haloes gone MAD: The Halo-Finder Comparison Project
• How to Plant a Merger Tree
• Galacticus: A Semi-Analytic Model of Galaxy Formation
• Generating Dark Matter Halo Merger Trees
• Building Merger Trees from Cosmological N-body Simulations
• Shark: introducing an open source, free and flexible semi-analytic model of galaxy formation
• AbacusSummit: A Massive Set of High-Accuracy, High-Resolution $N$-Body Simulations
• Corrfunc --- A Suite of Blazing Fast Correlation Functions on the CPU
• The Dark Side of Galaxy Color
• SubHaloes going Notts: The SubHalo-Finder Comparison Project
• N-body Dark Matter Haloes with simple Hierarchical Histories
• HBT+: an improved code for finding subhalos and building merger trees in cosmological simulations
• The $\text{Abacus}$ Cosmological $N$-body Code
• Sussing Merger Trees: The Merger Trees Comparison Project
• Velocity Bias from the Small Scale Clustering of SDSS-III BOSS Galaxies
• Galaxy formation in the Planck Millennium: the atomic hydrogen content of dark matter halos
• ORIGAMI: Delineating Halos using Phase-Space Folds
• The accretion history of dark matter halos II: The connections with the mass power spectrum and the density profile
• Breaking the Degeneracies Between Cosmology and Galaxy Bias
• The Abacus Cosmos: A Suite of Cosmological N-body Simulations
• A High-Fidelity Realization of the Euclid Code Comparison $N$-body Simulation with Abacus
• AbacusHOD: A highly efficient extended multi-tracer HOD framework and its application to BOSS and eBOSS data
• \textsc{CompaSO}: A new halo finder for competitive assignment to spherical overdensities
• The host dark matter halos of [OII] emitters at 0.5< z< 1.5
• VOBOZ: An Almost-Parameter-Free Halo-Finding Algorithm
• The grouping, merging and survival of subhaloes in the simulated Local Group
• Evidence for galaxy assembly bias in BOSS CMASS redshift-space galaxy correlation function
• SURFS: Riding the waves with Synthetic UniveRses For Surveys
• The galaxy-halo connection of emission-line galaxies in IllustrisTNG
• The impact of baryonic physics on the shape and radial alignment of substructures in cosmological dark matter haloes
• Exploring the squeezed three-point galaxy correlation function with generalized halo occupation distribution models
• The Q Continuum Simulation: Harnessing the Power of GPU Accelerated Supercomputers
• Convergence properties of halo merger trees; halo and substructure merger rates across cosmic history
• Climbing Halo Merger Trees with TreeFrog
• Sussing Merger Trees: Stability and Convergence
• Observing Merger Trees in a New Light
• MEGA: Merger graphs of structure formation

Cited by in corpus (16)

• DESI 2024 III: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Galaxies and Quasars
• Consistent lensing and clustering in a low-$S_8$ Universe with BOSS, DES Year 3, HSC Year 1 and KiDS-1000
• DESI 2024 V: Full-Shape Galaxy Clustering from Galaxies and Quasars
• Stringent ${\sigma }_8$ constraints from small-scale galaxy clustering using a hybrid MCMC+emulator framework
• Semi-analytic forecasts for JWST -- VI. Simulated lightcones and galaxy clustering predictions
• A Preferential Growth Channel for Supermassive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies at z<2
• $\mathrm{S}\mathrm{IM}\mathrm{BIG}$: Mock Challenge for a Forward Modeling Approach to Galaxy Clustering
• The DESI $N$-body Simulation Project -- II. Suppressing sample variance with fast simulations
• Fiducial-Cosmology-dependent systematics for the DESI 2024 BAO Analysis
• HOD-Dependent Systematics in Emission Line Galaxies for the DESI 2024 BAO analysis
• HOD-Dependent Systematics for Luminous Red Galaxies in the DESI 2024 BAO Analysis
• On the accuracy of dark matter halo merger trees and the consequences for semi-analytic models of galaxy formation
• Fast generation of mock galaxy catalogues with COLA
• Convergence of halo statistics: code comparison between Rockstar and CompaSO using scale-free simulations
• Bounds on galaxy stochasticity from halo occupation distribution modeling
• Constraining primordial non-Gaussianity from the large scale structure two-point and three-point correlation functions