Tidal Tracks and Artificial Disruption of Cold Dark Matter Halos

Abstract

We describe a simple extension to existing models for the tidal heating of dark matter subhalos which takes into account second order terms in the impulse approximation for tidal heating. We show that this revised model can accurately match the tidal tracks along which subhalos evolve as measured in high-resolution N-body simulations. We further demonstrate that, when a constant density core is introduced into a subhalo, this model is able to quantitatively reproduce the evolution and artificial disruption of N-body subhalos arising from finite resolution effects. Combining these results we confirm prior work indicating that artificial disruption in N-body simulations can result in a factor two underestimate of the subhalo mass function in the inner regions of host halos, and a 10--20% reduction over the entire virial volume.

9 pages, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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• Tidal Stripping in the Adiabatic Limit
• Prompt cusps and the dark matter annihilation signal
• Tidal evolution of cored and cuspy dark matter halos
• How the Galaxy-Halo Connection Depends on Large-Scale Environment
• Novel Conservative Methods for Adaptive Force Softening in Collisionless and Multi-Species N-Body Simulations
• Limits on dark matter annihilation in prompt cusps from the isotropic gamma-ray background
• The Effects of Linear Matter Power Spectrum Enhancement on Dark Matter Substructure
• Faster than SAM: An empirical model for the tidal evolution of dark matter substructure around strong gravitational lenses
• Impulsive mixing of stellar populations in dwarf spheroidal galaxies
• Collisionless relaxation from near equilibrium configurations: Linear theory and application to tidal stripping
• Limits on Early Matter Domination from the Isotropic Gamma-Ray Background
• The cusp-halo relation
• New insights on low-mass dark matter subhalo tidal tracks via numerical simulations
• Semianalytic model for decaying dark matter halos
• Constraining the Nature of Dark Matter from Tidal Radii of Cluster Galaxy Subhalos
• The PARADIGM project II: The lifetimes and quenching of satellites in Milky Way-mass haloes