The structure of halos: Implications for group and cluster cosmology

Abstract

The dark matter halo mass function is a key repository of cosmological information over a wide range of mass scales, from individual galaxies to galaxy clusters. N-body simulations have established that the friends-of-friends (FOF) mass function has a universal form to a surprising level of accuracy (≲10%). The high-mass tail of the mass function is exponentially sensitive to the amplitude of the initial density perturbations, the mean matter density parameter, Ωm , and to the dark energy controlled late-time evolution of the density field. Observed group and cluster masses, however, are usually stated in terms of a spherical overdensity (SO) mass which does not map simply to the FOF mass. Additionally, the widely used halo models of structure formation - and halo occupancy distribution descriptions of galaxies within halos - are often constructed exploiting the universal form of the FOF mass function. This again raises the question of whether FOF halos can be simply related to the notion of a spherical overdensity mass. By employing results from Monte Carlo realizations of ideal Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) halos and N-body simulations, we study the relationship between the two definitions of halo mass. We find that the vast majority of halos (80%-85%) in the mass-range 10 12.5-1015.5 h -1 M⊙ indeed allow for an accurate mapping between the two definitions (∼5%), but only if the halo concentrations are known. Nonisolated halos fall into two broad classes: those with complex substructure that are poor fits to NFW profiles and those "bridged" by the (isodensity-based) FOF algorithm. A closer investigation of the bridged halos reveals that the fraction of these halos and their satellite mass distribution is cosmology dependent. We provide a preliminary discussion of the theoretical and observational ramifications of these results. © 2009. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.