English

Halo mass functions at high redshift

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-11-26 v3

Abstract

Recent JWST observations of very early galaxies, at z10\rm{z \gtrsim 10}, have led to claims that tension exists between the sizes and luminosities of high-redshift galaxies and what is predicted by standard Λ\LambdaCDM models. Here we use the adaptive mesh refinement code Enzo\texttt{Enzo} and the N-body smoothed particle hydrodynamics code SWIFT\texttt{SWIFT} to compare (semi-)analytic halo mass functions against the results of direct N-body models at high redshift. In particular, our goal is to investigate the variance between standard halo mass functions derived from (semi-)analytic formulations and N-body calculations and to determine what role any discrepancy may play in driving tensions between observations and theory. We find that the difference between direct N-body calculations and (semi-) analytic halo mass function fits is less than a factor of 2 (at z10\rm{z \sim 10}) within the mass range of galaxies currently being observed by JWST, and is therefore not a dominant source of error when comparing theory and observation at high redshift.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.15194,
  title  = {Halo mass functions at high redshift},
  author = {Hannah O'Brennan and John A. Regan and Chris Power and Saoirse Ward and John Brennan and Joe McCaffrey},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.15194},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, 11 pages, 9 figures. Acknowledgements updated

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:25:39.542Z