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Generating dark matter halo merger trees

Parkinson, H.; Cole, S.; Helly, J.

Authors

H. Parkinson

J. Helly



Abstract

We present a new Monte Carlo algorithm to generate merger trees describing the formation history of dark matter haloes. The algorithm is a modification of the algorithm of Cole et al. used in the galform semi-analytic galaxy formation model. As such, it is based on the Extended Press–Schechter theory and so should be applicable to hierarchical models with a wide range of power spectra and cosmological models. It is tuned to be in accurate agreement with the conditional mass functions found in the analysis of merger trees extracted from the Λ cold dark matter Millennium N-body simulation. We present a comparison of its predictions not only with these conditional mass functions, but also with additional statistics of the Millennium Simulation halo merger histories. In all cases, we find it to be in good agreement with the Millennium Simulation and thus it should prove to be a very useful tool for semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and for modelling hierarchical structure formation in general. We have made our merger tree generation code and code to navigate the trees available at http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~cole/merger_trees.

Citation

Parkinson, H., Cole, S., & Helly, J. (2008). Generating dark matter halo merger trees. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 383(2), 557-564. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.12517.x

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Jan 1, 2008
Deposit Date Apr 19, 2011
Publicly Available Date Jan 4, 2013
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 383
Issue 2
Pages 557-564
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.12517.x
Keywords Methods, Numerical, Cosmology, Dark matter.

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