English

Smooth halos in the cosmic web

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2018-03-22 v2

Abstract

Dark matter halos can be defined as smooth distributions of dark matter placed in a non-smooth cosmic web structure. This definition of halos demands a precise definition of smoothness and a characterization of the manner in which the transition from smooth halos to the cosmic web takes place. We introduce entropic measures of smoothness, related to measures of inequality previously used in economy and with the advantage of being connected with standard methods of multifractal analysis already used for characterizing the cosmic web structure in cold dark matter N-body simulations. These entropic measures provide us with a quantitative description of the transition from the small scales portrayed as a distribution of halos to the larger scales portrayed as a cosmic web and, therefore, allow us to assign definite sizes to halos. However, these "smoothness sizes" have no direct relation to the virial radii. Finally, we discuss the influence of N-body discreteness parameters on smoothness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.6197,
  title  = {Smooth halos in the cosmic web},
  author = {Jose Gaite},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.6197},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

21 pages, 11 figures, JCAP style; triaxial halos analyzed, references added, accepted in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:10:54.709Z