Haloes gone MAD★: The Halo-Finder Comparison Project

Knebe, Alexander; Knollmann, Steffen R.; Muldrew, Stuart I.; Pearce, Frazer R.; Aragón-Calvo, M. A.; Ascasíbar, Y.; Behroozi, Peter; Ceverino, Daniel; Colombi, S.; Diemand, Juerg; Dolag, K.; Falck, Bridget; Fasel, Patricia; Gardner, John R.; Gottlöber, Stefan; Hsu, Chung Hsing; Iannuzzi, Francesca; Klypin, Anatoly; Lukić, Zarija; Maciejewski, Michal; McBride, Cameron K.; Neyrinck, Mark C.; Planelles, S.; Potter, Doug; Quilis, Vicent; Rasera, Yann; Read, Justin I.; Ricker, P. M.; Roy, F.; Springel, Volker; Stadel, Joachim; Stinson, Greg; Sutter, P. M.; Turchaninov, V.; Tweed, Dylan; Yepes, Gustavo; Zemp, Marcel

doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.18858.x

Cited by 395 publications

(419 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…Dark matter haloes, substructure and tidal features are identified using ROCKSTAR, a 6D FOF group-finder based on adaptive hierarchical refinement (Behroozi et al 2013). This halo finder has been shown to recover halo properties with high accuracy and produces consistent results with other halo finders (Knebe et al 2011). The haloes and subhaloes found using ROCKSTAR are then joined into hierarchical merging trees that describe in detail how structures grow as the universe evolves.…”

Section: Underlying Dark Matter Simulationmentioning

confidence: 79%

Galaxy Cluster Mass Reconstruction Project – II. Quantifying scatter and bias using contrasting mock catalogues

Old

Wojtak

Mamon

et al. 2015

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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This article is the second in a series in which we perform an extensive comparison of various galaxy-based cluster mass estimation techniques that utilise the positions, velocities and colours of galaxies. Our aim is to quantify the scatter, systematic bias and completeness of cluster masses derived from a diverse set of 25 galaxy-based methods using two contrasting mock galaxy catalogues based on a sophisticated halo occupation model and a semi-analytic model. Analysing 968 clusters, we find a wide range in the RMS errors in log M 200c delivered by the different methods (0.18 to 1.08 dex, i.e., a factor of ∼1.5 to 12), with abundance matching and richness methods providing the best results, irrespective of the input model assumptions. In addition, certain methods produce a significant number of catastrophic cases where the mass is under-or over-estimated by a factor greater than 10. Given the steeply falling high-mass end of the cluster mass function, we recommend that richness or abundance matching-based methods are used in conjunction with these methods as a sanity check for studies selecting high mass clusters. We see a stronger correlation of the recovered to input number of galaxies for both catalogues in comparison with the group/cluster mass, however, this does not guarantee that the correct member galaxies are being selected. We do not observe significantly higher scatter for either mock galaxy catalogues. Our results have implications for cosmological analyses that utilise the masses, richnesses, or abundances of clusters, which have different uncertainties when different methods are used.

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Section: Underlying Dark Matter Simulationmentioning

confidence: 79%

Galaxy Cluster Mass Reconstruction Project – II. Quantifying scatter and bias using contrasting mock catalogues

Old

Wojtak

Mamon

et al. 2015

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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“…can differ by up to 10% (Knebe et al 2011). This might explain some of the discrepancies between our best fit model and those of other works.…”

Section: Comparison With Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The universality of the virial halo mass function and models for non-universality of other halo definitions

Despali¹,

Giocoli²,

Angulo³

et al. 2015

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

253

323

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The abundance of galaxy clusters can constrain both the geometry and growth of structure in our Universe. However, this probe could be significantly complicated by recent claims of nonuniversality -non-trivial dependences with respect to the cosmological model and redshift. In this work we analyse the dependance of the mass function on the way haloes are identified and establish if this can cause departures from universality. In order to explore this dependance, we use a set of different N-body cosmological simulations (Le SBARBINE simulations), with the latest cosmological parameters from the Planck collaboration; this first suite of simulations is followed by a lower resolution set, carried out with different cosmological parameters. We identify dark matter haloes using a Spherical Overdensity algorithm with varying overdensity thresholds (virial, 2000ρ c , 1000ρ c , 500ρ c , 200ρ c and 200ρ b ) at all redshifts. We notice that, when expressed in term of the rescaled variable ν, the mass function for virial haloes is a nearly universal as a function of redshift and cosmology, while this is clearly not the case for the other overdensities we considered. We provide fitting functions for the halo mass function parameters as a function of overdensity, that allow to predict, to within a few percent accuracy, the halo mass function for a wide range of halo definitions, redshifts and cosmological models. We then show how the departures from universality associated with other halo definitions can be derived by combining the universality of the virial definition with the expected shape of the density profile of halos.

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“…Comparison studies of these and other subhalo finders (Knebe et al 2011(Knebe et al , 2013aOnions et al 2012) have shown their results to be in good agreement, however. As such, the impact of using them on the different simulations is small when compared to the much larger variations between the aperture techniques (see below).…”

Section: Employed Subhalo Findersmentioning

confidence: 77%

Where do galaxies end? Comparing measurement techniques of hydrodynamic-simulation galaxies’ integrated properties

Stevens¹,

Martig²,

Croton³

et al. 2014

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Using the suite of high-resolution zoom re-simulations of individual haloes by Martig et al., and the large-scale simulation MassiveBlack-II, we examine the differences in measured galaxy properties from techniques with various aperture definitions of where galaxies end. We perform techniques popular in the literature and present a new technique of our own, where the aperture radius is based on the baryonic mass profiles of simulated (sub)haloes. For the average Milky-Way-mass system, we find the two most popular techniques in the literature return differences of order 30 per cent for stellar mass, a factor of 3 for gas mass, 40 per cent for star formation rate, and factors of several for gas accretion and ejection rates. Individual cases can show variations greater than this, with the severity dependent on the concentration of a given system. The average difference in integrated properties for a more general galaxy population are not as striking, but are still significant for stellar and gas mass, especially for optical-limit apertures. The large differences that can occur are problematic for comparing results from various publications. We stress the importance of both defining and justifying a technique choice and discourage using popular apertures that use an exact fraction of the virial radius, due to the unignorable variation in galaxy-to-(sub)halo size. Finally, we note that technique choice does not greatly affect simulated galaxies from lying within the scatter of observed scaling relations, but it can alter the derived best-fit slope for the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation.

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Haloes gone MAD★: The Halo-Finder Comparison Project

Cited by 395 publications

References 91 publications

Galaxy Cluster Mass Reconstruction Project – II. Quantifying scatter and bias using contrasting mock catalogues

Galaxy Cluster Mass Reconstruction Project – II. Quantifying scatter and bias using contrasting mock catalogues

The universality of the virial halo mass function and models for non-universality of other halo definitions

Where do galaxies end? Comparing measurement techniques of hydrodynamic-simulation galaxies’ integrated properties

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