Quadratic genetic modifications: a streamlined route to cosmological simulations with controlled merger history
Abstract
Recent work has studied the interplay between a galaxy's history and its observable properties using "genetically modified" cosmological zoom simulations. The approach systematically generates alternative histories for a halo, while keeping its cosmological environment fixed. Applications to date altered linear properties of the initial conditions such as the mean overdensity of specified regions; we extend the formulation to include quadratic features such as local variance, which determines the overall importance of smooth accretion relative to mergers in a galaxy's history. We introduce an efficient algorithm for this new class of modification and demonstrate its ability to control the variance of a region in a one-dimensional toy model. Outcomes of this work are two-fold: (i) a clarification of the formulation of genetic modifications and (ii) a proof of concept for quadratic modifications leading the way to a forthcoming implementation in cosmological simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.04615,
title = {Quadratic genetic modifications: a streamlined route to cosmological simulations with controlled merger history},
author = {Martin P. Rey and Andrew Pontzen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.04615},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Minor modifications to match accepted version