Light-cone Simulations: Evolution of dark matter haloes

P. Heinämäki, I. Suhhonenko, E. Saar, M. Einasto, J. Einasto, and H. Virtanen

We present a new fast method for simulating pencil-beam type light-cones, using the MLAPM-code (Multi Level Adaptive Particle Mesh) with light-cone additions. By a careful choice of the light-cone parameters we to avoid extra periodicities in the light-cone. We apply the method to simulate a 6 Gpc deep light-cone. We create the dark matter halo catalogue for the light-cone and study the evolution of haloes from $z=6$ up to the present time. We determine the spatial density of the haloes, their large-scale correlation function, the evolution of the mass function. We find a surprisingly simple relation for the dependence of halo maximum mass on redshift, and apply it to derive redshift limits for bright quasars.

We show the projected (dark-matter) density fields of our light-cone simulation from z=0 to z=6 (for the cosmological model chosen z=6 corresponds to 5981.42 Mpc.

GR Smoothing kernel 1 Mpc

GR Smoothing kernel 16 Mpc

GR A fly-through movie

GR Haloes in lightcone at lower redshift

GR Haloes in lightcone at higher redshift

The sizes of spheres are proportional to their virial radii. Colors show masses of haloes: red spheres are most massive (M>= 10**14), yellow, blue, grey spheres correspond to decreasing order of mass (10**13, 10**12 and 10**11).

Lightcone poster at Tartu Workshop 2005

 

Back to Cosmo page

CF Maret Einasto (maret@aai.ee)