Although a fair amount of work has been devoted to growing Monte-Carlo merger trees which resemble those built from an N-body simulation, comparatively little effort has been invested in quantifying the caveats one necessarily encounters when one extracts trees directly from such a simulation. To somewhat revert the tide, this paper seeks to provide its reader with a comprehensive study of the problems one faces when following this route. The first step to building merger histories of dark matter haloes and their subhaloes is to identify these structures in each of the time outputs (snapshots) produced by the simulation. Even though we discuss a particular implementation of such an algorithm (called AdaptaHOP) in this paper, we believe that our results do not depend on the exact details of the implementation but extend to most if not all (sub)structure finders. We then highlight different ways to build merger histories from AdaptaHOP haloes and subhaloes, contrasting their various advantages and drawbacks. We find that the best approach to (sub)halo merging histories is through an analysis that goes back and forth between identification and tree building rather than one which conducts a straightforward sequential treatment of these two steps. This is rooted in the complexity of the merging trees which have to depict an inherently dynamical process from the partial temporal information contained in the collection of instantaneous snapshots available from the N-body simulation.
Merger trees follow the growth and merger of dark-matter haloes over cosmic history. As well as giving important insights into the growth of cosmic structure in their own right, they provide an essential backbone to semi-analytic models of galaxy formation. This paper is the first in a series to arise from the SUSSING MERGER TREES Workshop in which ten different tree-building algorithms were applied to the same set of halo catalogues and their results compared. Although many of these codes were similar in nature, all algorithms produced distinct results. Our main conclusions are that a useful …
Merger tree codes are routinely used to follow the growth and merger of dark matter haloes in simulations of cosmic structure formation. Whereas in Srisawat et. al. we compared the trees built using a wide variety of such codes here we study the influence of the underlying halo catalogue upon the resulting trees. We observe that the specifics of halo finding itself greatly influences the constructed merger trees. We find that the choices made to define the halo mass are of prime importance. For instance, amongst many potential options different finders select self-bound objects or spherical re…
Aims: We discuss the dependence of shocks, cosmic rays acceleration and turbulence on the dynamical state of the host clusters. Method: We perform cosmological simulations with the grid code ENZO 1.5, with a mesh refinement scheme tailored to follow at high resolution shocks and turbulence developed in the clusters volume. Results: Sizable differences are found when some important properties, connected to non-thermal activity in clusters, are compared for post-merger, merging and relaxing systems.
We construct merger trees based on the extended Press-Schechter theory (EPS) in order to study the merger rates of dark matter haloes over a range of present day mass ($10^{10}M_{\sun}\leq M_0 \leq10^{15}M_{\sun}$), progenitor mass $(5\times10^{-3}\leq ξ\leq1$) and redshift ($0\leq z\leq 3$). We used the first crossing distribution of a moving barrier of the form $B(S,z)=p(z)+q(z)S^γ$, proposed by Sheth & Tormen, to take into account the ellipsoidal nature of collapse. We find that the mean merger rate per halo $B_m/n$ depends on the halo mass $M$ as $M^{0.2}$ and on the redshift as $(\mathrm{…
Halo merger trees describe the hierarchical mass assembly of dark matter haloes, and are the backbone for modeling galaxy formation and evolution. Merger trees constructed using Monte Carlo algorithms based on the extended Press-Schechter (EPS) formalism are complementary to those extracted from N-body simulations, and have the advantage that they are not trammeled by limited numerical resolution and uncertainties in identifying (sub)haloes and linking them between snapshots. This paper compares multiple EPS-based merger tree algorithms to simulation results using four diagnostics: progenitor …
We describe a new methodology to analyze the reionization process in numerical simulations: The evo- lution of the reionization is investigated by focusing on the merger histories of individual HII regions. From the merger tree of ionized patches, one can track the individual evolution of the regions such as e.g. their size, or investigate the properties of the percolation process by looking at the formation rate, the frequency of mergers and the number of individual HII regions involved in the mergers. By applying this technique to cosmological simulations with radiative transfer, we show how…
Merger trees are routinely used to follow the growth and merging history of dark matter haloes and subhaloes in simulations of cosmic structure formation. Srisawat et al. (2013) compared a wide range of merger-tree-building codes. Here we test the influence of output strategies and mass resolution on tree-building. We find that, somewhat surprisingly, building the tree from more snapshots does not generally produce more complete trees; instead, it tends to short- en them. Significant improvements are seen for patching schemes which attempt to bridge over occasional dropouts in the underlying h…
We model the formation and evolution of galaxy clusters in the framework of an extended dark matter halo merger-tree algorithm that includes baryons and incorporates basic physical considerations. Our modified treatment is employed to calculate the probability density functions of the halo concentration parameter, intracluster gas temperature, and the integrated Comptonization parameter for different cluster masses and observation redshifts. Scaling relations between cluster mass and these observables are deduced that are somewhat different than previous results. Modeling uncertainties in the …
A halo merger tree forms the essential backbone of a semi-analytic model for galaxy formation and evolution. Recent studies have pointed out that extracting merger trees from numerical simulations of structure formation is non-trivial; different tree building algorithms can give differing merger histories. These differences should be carefully understood before merger trees are used as input for models of galaxy formation. We investigate the impact of different halo merger trees on a semi-analytic model. We find that the z=0 galaxy properties in our model show differences between trees when us…
Utilizing a high-resolution (114 pc/h) adaptive mesh-refinement cosmological galaxy formation simulation of the standard cold dark matter model with a large (2000-3000 galaxies with stellar mass greater than 1e9 Msun) statistical sample, we examine the role of major mergers in driving star formation at z>1 in a cosmological setting, after validating that some of the key properties of simulated galaxies are in reasonable agreement with observations, including luminosity functions, SF history, effective sizes and damped Lyman alpha systems. We find that major mergers have a relatively modest eff…
We have recently developed an extended merger-tree model that efficiently follows hierarchical evolution of galaxy clusters and provides a quantitative description of both their dark matter and gas properties. We employed this diagnostic tool to calculate the thermal SZ power spectrum and cluster number counts, accounting explicitly for uncertainties in the relevant statistical and intrinsic cluster properties, such as the halo mass function and the gas equation of state. Results of these calculations are compared with those obtained from a direct analytic treatment and from hydrodynamical sim…
We propose a common terminology for use in describing both temporal merger trees and spatial structure trees for dark-matter halos. We specify a unified data format in HDF5 and provide example I/O routines in C, FORTRAN and PYTHON.
We describe a new methodology to analyze the reionization process in numerical simulations: the chronology and the geometry of reionization is investigated by means of merger histories of individual HII regions. From the merger tree of ionized patches, one can track the individual evolution of the regions properties such as e.g. their size, or the intensity of the percolation process by looking at the formation rate, the frequency of mergers and the number of individual HII regions involved in the mergers. We apply the merger tree technique to simulations of reionization with three different k…
The stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB) from halo mergers is investigated by a quasi-analytic method. The method we employ consists of two steps. The first step is to construct a merger tree by using the Extended Press-Schechter formalism or the Sheth & Tormen formalism, with Monte-Carlo realizations. This merger tree provides evolution of halo masses. From $N$-body simulation of two-halo mergers, we can estimate the amount of gravitational wave emission induced by the individual merger process. Therefore the second step is to combine this gravitaional wave emission to the merger tr…
Virtually any investigation involving dark matter halos relies on a definition of their radius, mass, and of whether they are a subhalo. The halo boundary is most commonly defined to include a spherical overdensity contrast (such as R200c, Rvir, and R200m), but different thresholds lead to significant differences in radius and mass. The splashback radius has recently been suggested as a more physically motivated (and generally larger) halo boundary, adding to the range of definitions. It is often difficult to assess the impact of a particular choice because most halo catalogs contain only one …
Tracking the formation and evolution of dark matter haloes is a critical aspect of any analysis of cosmological $N$-body simulations. In particular, the mass assembly of a halo and its progenitors, encapsulated in the form of its merger tree, serves as a fundamental input for constructing semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and, more generally, for building mock catalogues that emulate galaxy surveys. We present an algorithm for constructing halo merger trees from AbacusSummit, the largest suite of cosmological $N$-body simulations performed to date consisting of nearly 60 trillion partic…
We develop a parameter-free analytic model to include the effects of mergers into the theoretical modelling of the X-ray temperature function of galaxy clusters. We include this description into our model for the cluster population based on fluctuations of the gravitational potential, which avoids any reference to mass. Comparisons with a numerical simulation reveal that the theoretical model is in good agreement with the simulation results. We show that building the model on the dynamics of spherical rather than ellipsoidal collapse yields better results if emission-weighted temperatures are …
Dark matter halo merger trees are now routinely extracted from cosmological simulations of structure formation. These trees are frequently used as inputs to semi-analytic models of galaxy formation to provide the backbone within which galaxy formation takes place. By necessity, these merger trees are constructed from a finite set of discrete "snapshots" of the N-body simulation and so have a limited temporal resolution. To date, there has been little consideration of how this temporal resolution affects the properties of galaxies formed within these trees. In particular, the question of how ma…
We present a new approach to study galaxy evolution in a cosmological context. We combine cosmological merger trees and semi-analytic models of galaxy formation to provide the initial conditions for multi-merger hydrodynamic simulations. In this way we exploit the advantages of merger simulations (high resolution and inclusion of the gas physics) and semi-analytic models (cosmological background and low computational cost), and integrate them to create a novel tool. This approach allows us to study the evolution of various galaxy properties, including the treatment of the hot gaseous halo from…
Dark matter haloes in cosmological N-body simulations are affected by processes such as mergers, accretion and the gravitational interaction with baryonic matter. Typically the analysis of dark matter haloes is performed in spherical or elliptical bins and the velocity distributions are often assumed to be constant within those bins. However, the velocity anisotropy, which describes differences between the radial and tangential velocity dispersion, has recently been show to have a strong dependence on direction in the triaxial halos formed in cosmological simulations. In this study we derive p…
As galaxy formation and evolution over long cosmic time-scales depends to a large degree on the structure of the universe, the assembly history of galaxies is potentially a powerful approach for learning about the universe itself. In this paper we examine the merger history of dark matter halos based on the Extended Press-Schechter formalism as a function of cosmological parameters, redshift and halo mass. We calculate how major halo mergers are influenced by changes in the cosmological values of $Ω_{\rm m}$, $Ω_Λ$, $σ_{8}$, the dark matter particle temperature (warm vs. cold dark matter), and…
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）；University of Campinas（坎皮纳斯大学）；Universidad Diego Portales（迭戈·波塔莱斯大学）
Semi-analytic models are best suited to compare galaxy formation and evolution theories with observations. These models rely heavily on halo merger trees, and their realistic features (i.e., no drastic changes on halo mass or jumps on physical locations). Our aim is to provide a new framework for halo merger tree generation that takes advantage of the results of large volume simulations, with a modest computational cost. We treat halo merger tree construction as a matrix generation problem, and propose a Generative Adversarial Network that learns to generate realistic halo merger trees. We eva…
Cosmological N-body simulations rank among the most computationally intensive efforts today. A key challenge is the analysis of structure, substructure, and the merger history for many billions of compact particle clusters, called halos. Effectively representing the merging history of halos is essential for many galaxy formation models used to generate synthetic sky catalogs, an important application of modern cosmological simulations. Generating realistic mock catalogs requires computing the halo formation history from simulations with large volumes and billions of halos over many time steps,…
Dark matter subhalos are the remnants of (incomplete) halo mergers. Identifying them and establishing their evolutionary links in the form of merger trees is one of the most important applications of cosmological simulations. The Hierachical Bound-Tracing (HBT) code identifies halos as they form and tracks their evolution as they merge, simultaneously detecting subhalos and building their merger trees. Here we present a new implementation of this approach, HBT+, that is much faster, more user friendly, and more physically complete than the original code. Applying HBT+ to cosmological simulatio…
This paper summarises the potential of the LISA mission to constrain the expansion history of the universe using massive black hole binary mergers as gravitational wave standard sirens. After briefly reviewing the concept of standard siren, the analysis and methodologies of Ref. [1] are briefly outlined to show how LISA can be used as a cosmological probe, while a selection of results taken from Refs. [1,2] is presented in order to estimate the power of LISA in constraining cosmological parameters.
We present a new algorithm for generating merger trees and halo catalogs which explicitly ensures consistency of halo properties (mass, position, and velocity) across timesteps. Our algorithm has demonstrated the ability to improve both the completeness (through detecting and inserting otherwise missing halos) and purity (through detecting and removing spurious objects) of both merger trees and halo catalogs. In addition, our method is able to robustly measure the self-consistency of halo finders; it is the first to directly measure the uncertainties in halo positions, halo velocities, and the…
Accretion is thought to primarily contribute to the mass accumulation history of supermassive black holes throughout cosmic time. While this may be true at high redshifts, at lower redshifts and for the most massive black holes mergers themselves might add significantly to the mass budget. We evolve SMBHs from $4 > z > 0$ using merger trees derived from hydrodynamical cosmological simulations of a cluster and void region, scaled to the observed value of the stellar mass fraction to account for overcooling. Mass gains from gas accretion proportional to bulge growth and BH-BH mergers are tracked…
The implementation of ACACIA, a new algorithm to generate dark matter halo merger trees with the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) code RAMSES, is presented. The algorithm is fully parallel and based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI). As opposed to most available merger tree tools, it works on the fly during the course of the N body simulation. It can track dark matter substructures individually using the index of the most bound particle in the clump. Once a halo (or a sub-halo) merges into another one, the algorithm still tracks it through the last identified most bound particle in the clum…
When following the growth of structure in the Universe, we propose replacing merger trees with merger graphs, in which haloes can both merge and split into separate pieces. We show that this leads to smoother mass growth and eliminates catastrophic failures in which massive haloes have no progenitors or descendants. For those who prefer to stick with merger trees, we find that trees derived from our merger graphs have similar mass growth properties to previous methods, but again without catastrophic failures. For future galaxy formation modelling, two different density thresholds can be used t…
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Universidad Diego Portales（迭戈·波塔莱斯大学）
A key ingredient for semi-analytic models (SAMs) of galaxy formation is the mass assembly history of haloes, encoded in a tree structure. The most commonly used method to construct halo merger histories is based on the outcomes of high-resolution, computationally intensive N-body simulations. We show that machine learning (ML) techniques, in particular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are a promising new tool to tackle this problem with a modest computational cost and retaining the best features of merger trees from simulations. We train our GAN model with a limited sample of merger tre…
Modelling the growth histories of specific galaxies often involves generating the entire population of objects that arise in a given cosmology and selecting systems with appropriate properties. This approach is highly inefficient when targeting rare systems such as the extremely luminous high-redshift galaxy candidates detected by JWST. Here, we present a novel framework for generating merger trees with branches that are guaranteed to achieve a desired halo mass at a chosen redshift. This method augments extended Press Schechter theory solutions with constrained random processes known as Brown…
I highlight three results from cosmological hydrodynamic simulations that yield a realistic red sequence of galaxies: 1) Major galaxy mergers are not responsible for shutting off star-formation and forming the red sequence. Starvation in hot halos is. 2) Massive galaxies grow substantially (about a factor of 2 in mass) after being quenched, primarily via minor (1:5) mergers. 3) Hot halo quenching naturally explains why galaxies are red when they either (a) are massive or (b) live in dense environments.
We present a comparative study of recent works on merger-timescales with dynamical friction and find a strong contrast between idealized/isolated mergers (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2008) and mergers from a cosmological volume (Jiang et al. 2008). Our study measures the duration of mergers in a cosmological N-body simulation of dark matter, with emphasis on higher redshifts (z < 10) and a lower mass range. In our analysis we consider and compare two merger definitions; tidal disruption and coalescence. We find that the merger-time formula proposed by Jiang et al. (2008) describes our results well a…
Recent work has studied the interplay between a galaxy's history and its observable properties using "genetically modified" cosmological zoom simulations. The approach systematically generates alternative histories for a halo, while keeping its cosmological environment fixed. Applications to date altered linear properties of the initial conditions such as the mean overdensity of specified regions; we extend the formulation to include quadratic features such as local variance, which determines the overall importance of smooth accretion relative to mergers in a galaxy's history. We introduce an …
We perform collisionless N-body simulations to investigate whether binary mergers between rotationally-supported dwarfs can lead to the formation of dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs). Our simulation campaign is based on a hybrid approach combining cosmological simulations and controlled numerical experiments. We select merger events from a Constrained Local UniversE (CLUES) simulation of the Local Group (LG) and record the properties of the interacting dwarf-sized halos. This information is subsequently used to seed controlled experiments of binary encounters between dwarf galaxies consisting …
Linking the properties of galaxies to the assembly history of their dark matter haloes is a central aim of galaxy evolution theory. This paper introduces a dimensionless parameter $s\in[0,1]$, the "tree entropy", to parametrise the geometry of a halo's entire mass assembly hierarchy, building on a generalisation of Shannon's information entropy. By construction, the minimum entropy ($s=0$) corresponds to smoothly assembled haloes without any mergers. In contrast, the highest entropy ($s=1$) represents haloes grown purely by equal-mass binary mergers. Using simulated merger trees extracted from…
Recently, Thornton et al. reported the detection of four fast radio bursts (FRBs). The dispersion measures indicate that the sources of these FRBs are at cosmological distance. Given the large full sky event rate ~ 10^4 sky^-1 day^-1, the FRBs are a promising target for multi-messenger astronomy. Here we propose double degenerate, binary white-dwarf (WD) mergers as the source of FRBs, which are produced by coherent emission from the polar region of a rapidly rotating, magnetized massive WD formed after the merger. The basic characteristics of the FRBs, such as the energetics, emission duration…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) at cosmological distances have recently been discovered, whose duration is about milliseconds. We argue that the observed short duration is difficult to explain by giant flares of soft gamma-ray repeaters, though their event rate and energetics are consistent with FRBs. Here we discuss binary neutron star (NS-NS) mergers as a possible origin of FRBs. The FRB rate is within the plausible range of NS-NS merger rate and its cosmological evolution, while a large fraction of NS-NS mergers must produce observable FRBs. A likely radiation mechanism is coherent radio emission …
Which mechanism(s) are mainly driving nuclear activity in the centres of galaxies is a major unsettled question. In this study, we investigate the statistical relevance of galaxy mergers for fuelling gas onto the central few kpc of a galaxy, potentially resulting in an active galactic nucleus (AGN). To robustly address that, we employ large-scale cosmological hydrodynamic simulations from the Magneticum Pathfinder set, including models for BH accretion and AGN feedback. Our simulations predict that for luminous AGN ($L_{\rm AGN} > 10^{45} {\rm erg/s}$) at $z = 2$, more than 50 per cent of thei…
A common approach in semi-analytic modeling of galaxy formation is to construct Monte Carlo realizations of merger histories of dark matter halos whose masses are sampled from a halo mass function. Both the mass function itself, and the merger rates used to construct merging histories are calibrated to N-body simulations. Typically, "backsplash" halos (those which were once subhalos within a larger halo, but which have since moved outside of the halo) are counted in both the halo mass function, and in the merger rates (or, equivalently, progenitor mass functions). This leads to a double-counti…
Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Sorbonne Université, CNRS（巴黎天体物理学研究所，索邦大学，法国国家科学研究中心）；Kyung Hee University, Dept. of Astronomy & Space Science（庆熙大学，天文与空间科学系）
We use semi-analytic models and cosmological merger trees to provide the initial conditions for multi-merger numerical hydrodynamic simulations, and exploit these simulations to explore the effect of galaxy interaction and merging on star formation (SF). We compute numerical realisations of twelve merger trees from z=1.5 to z=0. We include the effects of the large hot gaseous halo around all galaxies, following recent obervations and predictions of galaxy formation models. We find that including the hot gaseous halo has a number of important effects. Firstly, as expected, the star formation ra…
We consider the evolution of cosmological gravitational waves in scalar-tensor theory and $F(R)$ gravity theory as typical models of the modified gravity. Although the propagation speed is not changed from the speed of light, the propagation phase changes when we compare the propagation in these modified gravity theories with the propagation in the $Λ$CDM model. The phase change might be detected in future observations.
We introduce and apply a new approach to probe the response of galactic stellar haloes to the interplay between cosmological merger histories and galaxy formation physics. We perform dark matter-only, zoomed simulations of two Milky Way-mass hosts and make targeted, controlled changes to their cosmological histories using the genetic modification technique. Populating each history's stellar halo with a semi-empirical, particle tagging approach then enables a controlled study, with all instances converging to the same large-scale structure, dynamical and stellar mass at $z=0$ as their reference…
Using the Millennium-II Simulation dark matter sub-halo merger histories, we created mock catalogs of Lyman Alpha Emitting (LAE) galaxies at z=3.1 to study the properties of their descendants. Several models were created by selecting the sub-halos to match the number density and typical dark matter mass determined from observations of these galaxies. We used mass-based and age-based selection criteria to study their effects on descendant populations at z~2, 1 and 0. For the models that best represent LAEs at z=3.1, the z=0 descendants have a median dark matter halo mass of 10^12.7 M_Sun, with …
The identification of the electromagnetic counterpart candidate ZTF19abanrhr to the binary black hole merger GW190521 opens the possibility to infer cosmological parameters from this standard siren with a uniquely identified host galaxy. The distant merger allows for cosmological inference beyond the Hubble constant. Here we show that the three-dimensional spatial location of ZTF19abanrhr calculated from the electromagnetic data remains consistent with the updated sky localization of GW190521 provided by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration. If ZTF19abanrhr is associated with the GW190521 merger and a…
We examine the clustering properties of a population of quasars drawn from fully hydrodynamic cosmological simulations that directly follow black hole growth. We find that the black hole correlation function is best described by two distinct components: contributions from BH pairs occupying the same dark matter halo ('1-halo term') which dominate at scales below 300 kpc/h, and contributions from BHs occupying separate halos ('2-halo term') which dominate at larger scales. From the 2-halo BH term we find a typical host halo mass for faint-end quasars (those probed in our simulation volumes) ran…
With the detection of gravitational wave (GW) GW170817 and its associated electromagnetic (EM) counterparts from a binary neutron star (NS) merger, the "standard siren" method for Hubble-constant measurements is expected to play a role in the Hubble-constant tension in the next few years. One intriguing proposal put forward in multiple studies is to use an NS merger's optical counterpart, known as a kilonova, as a standard candle, because its absolute magnitude can in principle be calculated from simulations. In this work, I detail the statistical framework for performing joint standard-candle…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are ubiquitous in galaxies with a sizable mass. It is expected that a pair of SMBHs originally in the nuclei of two merging galaxies would form a binary and eventually coalesce via a burst of gravitational waves. So far theoretical models and simulations have been unable to predict directly the SMBH merger timescale from ab-initio galaxy formation theory, focusing only on limited phases of the orbital decay of SMBHs under idealized conditions of the galaxy hosts. The predicted SMBH merger timescales are long, of order Gyrs, which could be problematic for future…
We present a new suite of cosmological zoom-in hydrodynamical ($\approx 20\, \mathrm{pc}$ spatial resolution) simulations of Milky-Way mass galaxies to study how a varying mass ratio for a Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE) progenitor impacts the $z=0$ chemodynamics of halo stars. Using the genetic modification approach, we create five cosmological histories for a Milky-Way-mass dark matter halo ($M_{200} \approx 10^{12} \, M_\mathrm{\odot}$), incrementally increasing the stellar mass ratio of a $z\approx2$ merger from 1:25 to 1:2, while fixing the galaxy's final dynamical, stellar mass and large-sc…
We present a statistical analysis of flybys of dark matter halos compared to mergers using cosmological $N$-body simulations. We mainly focus on gravitationally interacting target halos with mass of $10^{10.8}-10^{13.0}h^{-1}M_{\odot}$, and their neighbors are counted only when the mass ratio is 1:3$-$3:1 and the distance is less than the sum of the virial radii of target and neighbor. The neighbors are divided into the flyby or merger samples if the pair's total energy is greater or smaller, respectively, than the capture criterion with consideration of dynamical friction. The main results ar…
