Detecting a physical difference between the CDM halos in simulation and in nature

Abstract

Numerical simulation is an important tool to help us understand the process of structure formation in the universe. However many simulation results of cold dark matter (CDM) halos on small scale are inconsistent with observations: the central density profile is too cuspy and there are too many substructures. Here we point out that these two problems may be connected with a hitherto unrecognized bias in the simulation halos. Although CDM halos in nature and in simulation are both virialized systems of collisionless CDM particles, gravitational encounter cannot be neglected in the simulation halos because they contain much less particles. We demonstrate this by two numerical experiments, showing that there is a difference on the microcosmic scale between the natural and simulation halos. The simulation halo is more akin to globular clusters where gravitational encounter is known to lead to such drastic phenomena as core collapse. And such artificial core collapse process appears to link the two problems together in the bottom-up scenario of structure formation in the $\Lambda$CDM universe. The discovery of this bias also has implications on the applicability of the Jeans Theorem in Galactic Dynamics.

5 pages, 4 figures, ApJ Letters submitted. Comments and suggestions welcome

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