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We present a detailed comparison of the substructure properties of a single Milky Way sized dark matter halo from the Aquarius suite at five different resolutions, as identified by a variety of different (sub-)halo finders for simulations of cosmic structure formation. These finders span a wide range of techniques and methodologies to extract and quantify substructures within a larger non-homogeneous background density (e.g. a host halo). This includes real-space, phase-space, velocity-space and time- space based finders, as well as finders employing a Voronoi tessellation, friends-of-friends techniques, or refined meshes as the starting point for locating substructure.A common post-processing pipeline was used to uniformly analyse the particle lists provided by each finder. We extract quantitative and comparable measures for the subhaloes, primarily focusing on mass and the peak of the rotation curve for this particular study. We find that all of the finders agree extremely well on the presence and location of substructure and even for properties relating to the inner part part of the subhalo (e.g. the maximum value of the rotation curve). For properties that rely on particles near the outer edge of the subhalo the agreement is at around the 20 per cent level. We find that basic properties (mass, maximum circular velocity) of a subhalo can be reliably recovered if the subhalo contains more than 100 particles although its presence can be reliably inferred for a lower particle number limit of 20. We finally note that the logarithmic slope of the subhalo cumulative number count is remarkably consistent and <1 for all the finders that reached high resolution. If correct, this would indicate that the larger and more massive, respectively, substructures are the most dynamically interesting and that higher levels of the (sub-)subhalo hierarchy become progressively less important., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, Accepted for MNRAS

Using a statistical sample of dark matter haloes drawn from a suite of cosmological N-body simulations of the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model, we quantify the impact of a simulated halo's mass accretion and merging history on two commonly used measures of its dynamical state, the virial ratio eta and the centre of mass offset Delta r. Quantifying this relationship is important because the degree to which a halo is dynamically equilibrated will influence the reliability with which we can measure characteristic equilibrium properties of the structure and kinematics of a population of haloes. We begin by verifying that a halo's formation redshift zform correlates with its virial mass Mvir and we show that the fraction of its recently accreted mass and the likelihood of it having experienced a recent major merger increases with increasing Mvir and decreasing zform. We then show that both eta and Delta r increase with increasing Mvir and decreasing zform, which implies that massive recently formed haloes are more likely to be dynamically unrelaxed than their less massive and older counterparts. Our analysis shows that both eta and Delta r are good indicators of a halo's dynamical state, showing strong positive correlations with recent mass accretion and merging activity, but we argue that Delta r provides a more robust and better defined measure of dynamical state for use in cosmological N-body simulations at z~0. We find that Delta r < 0.04 is sufficient to pick out dynamically relaxed haloes at z=0. Finally, we assess our results in the context of previous studies, and consider their observational implications., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 13 pages, 15 figures

[abridged] We present a detailed comparison of fundamental dark matter halo properties retrieved by a substantial number of different halo finders. These codes span a wide range of techniques including friends-of-friends (FOF), spherical-overdensity (SO) and phase-space based algorithms. We further introduce a robust (and publicly available) suite of test scenarios that allows halo finder developers to compare the performance of their codes against those presented here. This set includes mock haloes containing various levels and distributions of substructure at a range of resolutions as well as a cosmological simulation of the large-scale structure of the universe. All the halo finding codes tested could successfully recover the spatial location of our mock haloes. They further returned lists of particles (potentially) belonging to the object that led to coinciding values for the maximum of the circular velocity profile and the radius where it is reached. All the finders based in configuration space struggled to recover substructure that was located close to the centre of the host halo and the radial dependence of the mass recovered varies from finder to finder. Those finders based in phase space could resolve central substructure although they found difficulties in accurately recovering its properties. Via a resolution study we found that most of the finders could not reliably recover substructure containing fewer than 30-40 particles. However, also here the phase space finders excelled by resolving substructure down to 10-20 particles. By comparing the halo finders using a high resolution cosmological volume we found that they agree remarkably well on fundamental properties of astrophysical significance (e.g. mass, position, velocity, and peak of the rotation curve)., Comment: 27 interesting pages, 20 beautiful figures, and 4 informative tables accepted for publication in MNRAS. The high-resolution version of the paper as well as all the test cases and analysis can be found at the web site http://popia.ft.uam.es/HaloesGoingMAD

We study the differences and similarities in the luminosities of bound, infalling and the so-called backsplash (Gill et al. 2005) galaxies of the Milky Way and M31 using a hydrodynamical simulation performed within the Constrained Local UniversE Simulation (CLUES) project. The simulation models the formation of the Local Group within a self-consistent cosmological framework. We find that even though backsplash galaxies passed through the virial radius of their host halo and hence may have lost a (significant) fraction of their mass, their stellar populations are hardly affected. This leaves us with comparable luminosity functions for infalling and backsplash galaxies and hence little hope to decipher their past (and different) formation and evolutionary histories by luminosity measurements alone. Nevertheless, due to the tidal stripping of dark matter we find that the mass-to-light ratios have changed when comparing the various populations against each other: they are highest for the infalling galaxies and lowest for the bound satellites with the backsplash galaxies in-between., Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in MNRAS

We investigate the effect of long-range scalar interactions in dark matter (DM) models of cosmic structure formation with a particular focus on the formation times of haloes. Utilising $N$-body simulations with $512^3$ DM particles we show that in our models dark matter haloes form substantially earlier: tracing objects up to redshift $z\sim6$ we find that the formation time, as characterised by the redshift $z_{1/2}$ at which the halo has assembled half of its final mass, is gradually shifted from $z_{1/2}\approx 1.83$ in the fiducial LCDM model to $z_{1/2}\approx 2.54$ in the most extreme self-interaction model. This is accompanied by a shift of the redshift that marks the transition between merger and steady accretion epochs from $z_{*}\approx 4.32$ in the \lcdm\ halos to $z_{*}\approx 6.39$ in our strongest interaction model. In other words, the scalar-interacting model employed in this work produces more structures at high redshifts, prolonging at the same time the steady accretion phases. These effects taken together can help the LCDM model to account for a high redshift reionisation as indicated by the WMAP data and can alleviate issues related to the survival of the thin-disk dominated galaxies at low redshifts., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Final version to be printed in MNRAS Letters. 4 new references added

We use two simulations performed within the Constrained Local UniversE Simulation (CLUES) project to study both the shape and radial alignment of (the dark matter component of) subhaloes; one of the simulations is a dark matter only model while the other run includes all the relevant gas physics and star formation recipes. We find that the involvement of gas physics does not have a statistically significant effect on either property -- at least not for the most massive subhaloes considered in this study. However, we observe in both simulations including and excluding gasdynamics a (pronounced) evolution of the dark matter shapes of subhaloes as well as of the radial alignment signal since infall time. Further, this evolution is different when positioned in the central and outer regions of the host halo today; while subhaloes tend to become more aspherical in the central 50% of their host's virial radius, the radial alignment weakens in the central regime while strengthening in the outer parts. We confirm that this is due to tidal torquing and the fact that subhaloes at pericentre move too fast for the alignment signal to respond., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS, replaced with proof-corrected version (minor typos)

Cosmological simulations are the key tool for investigating the different processes involved in the formation of the universe from small initial density perturbations to galaxies and clusters of galaxies observed today. The identification and analysis of bound objects, halos, is one of the most important steps in drawing useful physical information from simulations. In the advent of larger and larger simulations, a reliable and parallel halo finder, able to cope with the ever-increasing data files, is a must. In this work we present the freely available MPI parallel halo finder AHF. We provide a description of the algorithm and the strategy followed to handle large simulation data. We also describe the parameters a user may choose in order to influence the process of halo finding, as well as pointing out which parameters are crucial to ensure untainted results from the parallel approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability of AHF to scale to high resolution simulations., Comment: 18 pages, 18 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJS

We use a set of high-resolution simulations of scale-free Einstein-de Sitter cosmologies to investigate the logarithmic slope of the phase-space density profile $Q(r) = \rho(r)/\sigma^3(r)$ of dark matter (DM) haloes. The initial conditions for the simulations are determined by a power law power spectrum of the form $P(k) \propto k^n$. We compute the Q(r) profiles using the radial, tangential and full velocity dispersion, and the velocity anisotropy parameter, $\beta(r)$. We express Q(r) as a single power-law $Q(r) \propto r^\alpha$ and derive a median slope $\alpha$ in each simulation and for each definition of Q. Our main findings are: 1. The various Q(r) profiles follow a power law to a good approximation. 2. The slopes depend on the concentration parameter c of the DM haloes, where for $c \gtrsim 10$ the slopes steepen with rising concentration and for $c \lesssim 10$ the trend flattens and even turns around. 3. The asymptotic value of $\beta$ as $r\to R_{\mathrm{vir}}$ increases with the value of c. 4. In accordance with Zait et al. 2007 $\alpha_{\mathrm{rad}}$ becomes more negative as the asymptotic value of $\beta$ at the virial radius increases. 5. This introduces a weak dependence of the $Q(r)$ slopes on the slope of the power spectrum., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

We explore the dependence of the central logarithmic slope of dark matter halo density profiles $\alpha$ on the spectral index $n$ of the linear matter power spectrum $P(k)$ using cosmological $N$-body simulations of scale-free models (i.e. $P(k) \propto k^n$). For each of our simulations we identify samples of well resolved haloes in dynamical equilibrium and we analyse their mass profiles. By parameterising the mass profile using a ``generalised'' Navarro, Frenk & White profile in which the central logarithmic slope $\alpha$ is allowed to vary while preserving the $r^{-3}$ asymptotic form at large radii, we obtain preferred central slopes for haloes in each of our models. There is a strong correlation between $\alpha$ and $n$, such that $\alpha$ becomes shallower as $n$ becomes steeper. However, if we normalise our mass profiles by $r_{-2}$, the radius at which the logarithmic slope of the density profile is -2, we find that these differences are no longer present. We conclude that there is no evidence for convergence to a unique central asymptotic slope, at least on the scales that we can resolve., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS