Tuesday, December 6, 2011

1103.2099 (Jiaxin Han et al.)

Resolving Subhalos' Lives with the Hierarchical Bound-Tracing Algorithm    [PDF]

Jiaxin Han, Y. P. Jing, Huiyuan Wang, Wenting Wang
We develop a new code, the Hierarchical Bound-Tracing (HBT for short) code, to find and trace dark matter subhalos in simulations based on the merger hierarchy of dark matter halos. Application of this code to a recent benchmark test of finding subhalos demonstrates that HBT stands as one of the best codes to trace the evolution history of subhalos. The success of the code lies in its careful treatment of the complex physical processes associated with the evolution of subhalos and in its robust unbinding algorithm with an adaptive source subhalo management. We keep a full record of the merger hierarchy of halos and subhalos, and allow growth of satellite subhalos through accretion from its subordinate subhalos in the merger hierarchy hence allowing mergers among satellites. Local accretion of background mass is omitted while re-accretion of stripped mass is allowed. The justification of these treatments is provided by a case study of the life of individual subhalos and by the success in finding the complete subhalo catalog. Dependence of this tracing algorithm on the time resolution of simulation outputs has also been examined. We compare our result to other popular subhalo finders and show that HBT is able to well resolve subhalos in high density environment and keep strict physical track of subhalos' merger history. HBT also features its fast speed as it does not need density interpolation or spatial searching when constructing source subhalos, and because it is fully parallelized. This code is available upon request to the authors.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.2099

No comments:

Post a Comment