Can tides disrupt cold dark matter subhaloes?

Understand

The clumpiness of dark matter on sub-kpc scales is highly sensitive to the tidal evolution and survival of subhaloes.

• In agreement with previous studies, we show that N-body realisations of cold dark matter subhaloes with centrally-divergent density cusps form artificial constant-density cores on the scale of the resolution limit of the simulation.
• These density cores drive the artificial tidal disruption of subhaloes.
• We run controlled simulations of the tidal evolution of a single subhalo where we repeatedly reconstruct the density cusp, preventing artificial disruption.