Peaks above the Maxwellian Sea: A New Approach to Finding Substructure in N-Body Haloes

Understand

We describe a new algorithm for finding substructures within dark matter haloes from N-body simulations.

• The algorithm relies upon the fact that dynamically distinct substructures in a halo will have a {\em local} velocity distribution that differs significantly from the mean, i.e.
• smooth background halo.
• We characterize the large-scale mean field using a coarsely grained cell-based approach, while a kernel smoothing process is used to determined the local velocity distribution.