The Splashback Radius of Halos from Particle Dynamics. I. The SPARTA Algorithm

Abstract

Motivated by the recent proposal of the splashback radius as a physical boundary of dark-matter halos, we present a parallel computer code for Subhalo and PARticle Trajectory Analysis ( Sparta ). The code analyzes the orbits of all simulation particles in all host halos, billions of orbits in the case of typical cosmological N -body simulations. Within this general framework, we develop an algorithm that accurately extracts the location of the first apocenter of particles after infall into a halo, or splashback. We define the splashback radius of a halo as the smoothed average of the apocenter radii of individual particles. This definition allows us to reliably measure the splashback radii of 95% of host halos above a resolution limit of 1000 particles. We show that, on average, the splashback radius and mass are converged to better than 5% accuracy with respect to mass resolution, snapshot spacing, and all free parameters of the method.