The Halo Spin Transition as a Probe of Dark Energy

Abstract

We present a numerical evidence supporting the claim that the massdependent transitions of the halo spin orientations from the intermediate to the minor principal directions of the local tidal fields can in principle be a useful discriminator of dark energy models. We first define a spin transition zone as the mass range of the halos, ∆m t , for which the intrinsic spin alignments with the minor tidal principal directions become as strong as that with the intermediate principal directions. Then, utilizing the halo samples from the DEUS simulations performed separately for the WMAP7 ΛCDM, phantom DE and quintessence models, we investigate if and how the three different dark energy models differ in ∆m t . It is shown that the differences in ∆m t among the three dark energy models are significant enough to discriminate the models from one another and robust against the variations of the smoothing scale of the tidal field and redshift. Noting that a narrower spin transition zone is more powerful as a probe of dark energy, we also show that the spin transition zones become narrower at higher redshifts, in the filamentary environments and for the case that the tidal fields are smoothed on the smaller scales. Our result is consistent with the scenario that ∆m t is mainly determined by how fast the nonlinear evolution of the tidal field proceeds, which in turn sensitively depends on the background cosmology.

Dependence of the dynamical properties of light-cone simulation dark matter halos on their environment

“…As for the spin vector orientation relatively to the large-scale structure, many authors find that the spin of low-mass halos is aligned with their environment, i.e., along the filament ridge or on the sheet-plane, while, high-mass halos tend to have spinvectors perpendicular to their environment. The apparent orientation "transition" happens at the "spin-flip" mass, which is found to be of the order of 10 11 −10 12 h −1 M (e.g., Navarro et al 2004;Bailin & Steinmetz 2005;Aragón-Calvo et al 2007;Hahn et al 2007a;Ganeshaiah Veena et al 2018;Lee & Libeskind 2020). Moreover Brunino et al (2007) and Cuesta et al (2008) find that spin vectors tend to lie on the surface of voids.…”