Gravitational Mesoscopic Constraints in Cosmological Dark Matter Halos

Abstract

We present an analysis of the behaviour of the ‘coarse-grained’ (‘mesoscopic’) rank partitioning of the mean energy of collections of particles composing virialized dark matter halos in a Λ-CDM cosmological simulation. We find evidence that rank preservation depends on halo mass, in the sense that more massive halos show more rank preservation than less massive ones. We find that the most massive halos obey Arnold’s theorem (on the ordering of the characteristic frequencies of the system) more frequently than less massive halos. This method may be useful to evaluate the coarse-graining level (minimum number of particles per energy cell) necessary to reasonably measure signatures of ‘mesoscopic’ rank orderings in a gravitational system.