The halo spin flip refers to the phenomenon that the spin axes of dark matter halos with masses above a certain threshold tend to be preferentially aligned perpendicular to the hosting large-scale filaments, while low-mass halos tend to have their spin axes aligned parallel to such structures. Extensive work has so far been conducted to understand this phenomenon under the assumption of cold dark matter and suggested that its origin should be closely related to the nonlinear evolution of the halo angular momentum in the anisotropic cosmic web. We present, for the first time, a numerical examination of this phenomenon assuming the presence of massive neutrinos, finding a clear and robust dependence of the threshold mass for the spin flip on the total neutrino mass. Our physical explanation is that the presence of more massive neutrinos retard the nonlinear evolution of the cosmic web, which in turn allows the halo spin vectors to better retain their memories of the initial tidal interactions in the nonlinear regime. Our finding implies that the statistical alignment of halo spins with the large-scale structures can be in principle used as a probe of the total neutrino mass.
We expand our previous study on the relationship between changes in the orientation of the angular momentum vector of dark matter haloes ("spin flips") and changes in their mass (Bett & Frenk 2012), to cover the full range of halo masses in a simulation cube of length 100 $h^{-1}$ Mpc. Since strong disturbances to a halo (such as might be indicated by a large change in the spin direction) are likely also to disturb the galaxy evolving within, spin flips could be a mechanism for galaxy morphological transformation without involving major mergers. We find that 35% of haloes have, at some point i…
Both simulations and observations have found that the spin of halo/galaxy is correlated with the large scale environment, and particularly the spin of halo flips in filament. A consistent picture of halo spin evolution in different environments is still lacked. Using N-body simulation we find that halo spin with its environment evolves continuously from sheet to cluster, and the flip of halo spin happens both in filament and nodes. For the flip in filament can be explained by halo formation time and the migrating time when its environment changes from sheet to filament. For low-mass haloes, th…
We predict, analytically and by simulations, that gas discs tend to survive only in haloes above a threshold mass $\sim 2 \times 10^{11} M_\odot$ (stellar mass $\sim 10^9 M_\odot$), with only a weak redshift dependence. At lower masses, the disc spins typically flip in less than an orbital time due to mergers associated with a change in the pattern of the feeding cosmic-web streams. This threshold arises from the halo merger rate when accounting for the mass dependence of the ratio of galactic baryons and halo mass. Above the threshold, wet compactions lead to massive central nuggets that allo…
The tidal torque theory (TTT) relates the origin and evolution of angular momentum with the environment in which dark matter (DM) haloes form. The deviations introduced by late non-linearities are commonly thought as noise in the model. In this work, we analyze a cosmological simulation looking for systematics on these deviations, finding that the classification of DM haloes according to their angular momentum growth results in samples with different internal alignment, spin parameter distribution and assembly history. Based on this classification, we obtain that low mass haloes are embedded i…
We present that the spin$-$orbit alignment (SOA; i.e., the angular alignment between the spin vector of a halo and the orbital angular momentum vector of its neighbor) provides an important clue to how galactic angular momenta develop. In particular, we identify virial-radius-wise contact halo pairs with mass ratios from 1/3 to 3 in a set of cosmological $N$-body simulations, and divide them into merger and flyby subsamples according to their total (kinetic+potential) energy. In the spin$-$orbit angle distribution, we find a significant SOA in that $75.0\pm0.6$ % of merging neighbors and $58.7…
The observed galaxy distribution via galaxy redshift surveys appears distorted due to redshift-space distortions (RSD). While one dominant contribution to RSD comes from the Doppler effect induced by the peculiar velocity of galaxies, the relativistic effects, including the gravitational redshift effect, are recently recognized to give small but important contributions. Such contributions lead to an asymmetric galaxy clustering along the line of sight, and produce non-vanishing odd multipoles when cross-correlating between different biased objects. However, non-zero odd multipoles are also gen…
We study the spin alignment of galaxies and halos with respect to filaments and walls of the cosmic web, identified with DisPerSE, using the SIMBA simulation from z=0-2. Massive halos' spins are oriented perpendicularly to their closest filament's axis and walls, while low mass halos tend to have their spins parallel to filaments and in the plane of walls. A similar mass-dependent spin flip is found for galaxies, albeit with a weaker signal particularly at low mass and low-z, suggesting that galaxies' spins retain memory of their larger-scale environment. Low-z star-forming and rotation-domina…
We investigate the alignment of haloes with the filaments of the cosmic web using an unprecedently large sample of dark matter haloes taken from the P-Millennium $Λ$CDM cosmological N-body simulation. We use the state-of-the-art NEXUS morphological formalism which, due to its multiscale nature, simultaneously identifies structures at all scales. We find strong and highly significant alignments, with both the major axis of haloes and their peculiar velocity tending to orient along the filament. However, the spin - filament alignment displays a more complex trend changing from preferentially par…
We explore the phenomenon commonly known as halo assembly bias, whereby dark matter halos of the same mass are found to be more or less clustered when a second halo property is considered, for halos in the mass range $3.7 \times 10^{11} \; h^{-1} \mathrm{M_{\odot}} - 5.0 \times 10^{13} \; h^{-1} \mathrm{M_{\odot}}$. Using the Large Suite of Dark Matter Simulations (LasDamas) we consider nine commonly used halo properties and find that a clustering bias exists if halos are binned by mass or by any other halo property. This secondary bias implies that no single halo property encompasses all the …
Modified Gravity (MG) scenarios have been advocated to account for the dark energy phenomenon in the universe. These models predict departures from General Relativity on large cosmic scales that can be tested through a variety of probes such as observations of galaxy clusters among others. Here, we investigate the imprint of MG models on the internal mass distribution of cluster-like halos as probed by the dark matter halo sparsity. To this purpose we perform a comparative analysis of the properties of the halo sparsity using N-body simulation halo catalogs of a standard flat $Λ$CDM model and …
Clustering of dark matter halos has been shown to depend on halo properties beyond mass such as halo concentration, a phenomenon referred to as halo assembly bias. Standard halo occupation models (HOD) in large scale structure studies assume that halo mass alone is sufficient in characterizing the connection between galaxies and halos. Modeling of galaxy clustering can face systematic effects if the number of galaxies within a halo is correlated with other halo properties. Using the Small MultiDark-Planck high resolution $N$-body simulation and the clustering measurements of the Sloan Digital …
The clustering of dark matter haloes with fixed mass depends on their formation history, an effect known as assembly bias. We use zoom N -body simulations to investigate the origin of this phenomenon. For each halo at redshift z=0, we determine the time in which the physical volume containing its final mass becomes stable. We consider five examples for which this happens at z~1.5 and two that do not stabilize by z=0. The zoom simulations show that early-collapsing haloes do not grow in mass at z=0 while late-forming ones show a net inflow. The reason is that 'accreting' haloes are located at t…
We study the spin dynamics of individual black holes in a binary system. In particular we focus on the polar precession of spins and the possibility of a complete flip of spins with respect to the orbital plane. We perform a full numerical simulation that displays these characteristics. We evolve equal mass binary spinning black holes for $t=20,000M$ from an initial proper separation of $d=25M$ down to merger after 48.5 orbits. We compute the gravitational radiation from this system and compare it to 3.5 post-Newtonian generated waveforms finding close agreement. We then further use 3.5 post-N…
Dark matter halo clustering depends not only on halo mass, but also on other properties such as concentration and shape. This phenomenon is known broadly as assembly bias. We explore the dependence of assembly bias on halo definition, parametrized by spherical overdensity parameter, $Δ$. We summarize the strength of concentration-, shape-, and spin-dependent halo clustering as a function of halo mass and halo definition. Concentration-dependent clustering depends strongly on mass at all $Δ$. For conventional halo definitions ($Δ\sim 200\mathrm{m}-600\mathrm{m}$), concentration-dependent cluste…
The halo assembly bias, a phenomenon referring to dependencies of the large-scale bias of a dark matter halo other than its mass, is a fundamental property of the standard cosmological model. First discovered in 2005 from the Millennium Run simulation, it has been proven very difficult to be detected observationally, with only a few convincing claims of detection so far. The main obstacle lies in finding an accurate proxy of the halo formation time. In this study, by utilizing a constrained simulation that can faithfully reproduce the observed structures larger than $2\,$Mpc in the local unive…
Tidal gravitational forces can modify the shape of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, thus correlating their orientation with the surrounding matter density field. We study the dependence of this phenomenon, known as intrinsic alignment (IA), on the mass of the dark matter haloes that host these bright structures, analysing the Millennium and Millennium-XXL $N$-body simulations. We closely follow the observational approach, measuring the halo position-halo shape alignment and subsequently dividing out the dependence on halo bias. We derive a theoretical scaling of the IA amplitude with mass in…
(Mini) split supersymmetry explains the observed Higgs mass and evades stringent constraints, while keeping good features of TeV-scale supersymmetry other than the little hierarchy problem. Such scenarios naturally predict thermal wino dark matter whose mass is around $3 \, {\rm TeV}$. Its non-perturbatively enhanced annihilation is a promising target of indirect detection experiments. It is known that identifying the smallest halos is essential for reducing an uncertainty in interpreting indirect detection experiments. Despite its importance, the smallest halos of thermal wino dark matter hav…
