The Accuracy of Subhalo Detection

Understand

With the ever increasing resolution of N-body simulations, accurate subhalo detection is becoming essential in the study of the formation of structure, the production of merger trees and the seeding of semi-analytic models.

• To investigate the state of halo finders, we compare two different approaches to detecting subhaloes; the first based on overdensities in a halo and the second being adaptive mesh refinement.
• A set of stable mock NFW dark matter haloes were produced and a subhalo was placed at different radii within a larger halo.
• SUBFIND (a Friends-of-Friends based finder) and AHF (an adaptive mesh based finder) were employed to recover the subhalo.