Understand
We discuss an idealized model of halo formation, in which a collapsing halo node is tetrahedral, with a filament extruding from each of its four faces, and with a wall connecting each pair of filaments.
- In the model, filaments generally spin when they form, and the halo spins if and only if there is some rotation in filaments.
- This is the simplest-possible fully three-dimensional halo collapse in the 'origami approximation,' in which voids are irrotational, and the dark-matter sheet out of which dark-matter structures form is allowed to fold in position-velocity phase space, but not stretch (i.e., it cannot vary in density along a stream).
- Up to an overall scaling, the four filament directions, and only three other quantities, such as filament spins, suffice to determine all of the collapse's properties: the shape, mass, and spin of the halo; the densities per unit length and spins of all filaments; and masses per unit area of the walls.