Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 383, Issue 2, Pages 546-556Publisher
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.12516.x
Keywords
methods : numerical; cosmology : theory; dark matter
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present a comparison of the statistical properties of dark matter halo merger trees extracted from the Millennium Simulation with Extended Press-Schechter (EPS) formalism and the related GALFORM Monte Carlo method for generating ensembles of merger trees. The volume, mass resolution and output frequency make the Millennium Simulation a unique resource for the study of the hierarchical growth of structure. We construct the merger trees of present-day friends-of-friends groups and calculate a variety of statistics that quantify the masses of their progenitors as a function of redshift, accretion rates, and the redshift distribution of their most recent major merger. We also look in the forward direction and quantify the present-day mass distribution of haloes into which high-redshift progenitors of a specific mass become incorporated. We find that the EPS formalism and its Monte Carlo extension capture the qualitative behaviour of all these statistics, but as redshift increases they systematically underestimate the masses of the most massive progenitors. This shortcoming is worst for the Monte Carlo algorithm. We present a fitting function to a scaled version of the progenitor mass distribution and show how it can be used to make more accurate predictions of both progenitor and final halo mass distributions.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available