Statistics of substructures in dark matter haloes

Abstract

We study the amount and distribution of dark matter substructures within dark matter haloes, using a large set of high-resolution simulations ranging from group size to cluster size haloes, and carried our within a cosmological model consistent with WMAP 7-year data. In particular, we study how the measured properties of subhaloes vary as a function of the parent halo mass, the physical properties of the parent halo, and redshift. The fraction of halo mass in substructures increases with increasing mass. There is, however, a very large halo-to-halo scatter that can be explained only in part by a range of halo physical properties, e.g. concentration. At given halo mass, less concentrated haloes contain significantly larger fractions of mass in substructures because of the reduced strength of tidal disruption. Most of the substructure mass is located at the outskirts of the parent haloes, in relatively few massive subhaloes. This mass segregation appears to become stronger at increasing redshift, and should reflect into a more significant mass segregation of the galaxy population at different cosmic epochs. When haloes are accreted onto larger structures, their mass is significantly reduced by tidal stripping. Haloes that are more massive at the time of accretion (these should host more luminous galaxies) are brought closer to the centre on shorter time-scales by dynamical friction, and therefore suffer of a more significant stripping. The halo merger rate depends strongly on the environment with substructure in more massive haloes suffering more important mergers than their counterparts residing in less massive systems. This should translate into a different morphological mix for haloes of different mass.