Assembly bias and the dynamical structure of dark matter halos

Abstract

Based on the Millennium Simulation we examine assembly bias for the halo properties: shape, triaxiality, concentration, spin, shape of the velocity ellipsoid and velocity anisotropy. For consistency we determine all these properties using the same set of particles, namely all gravitationally self-bound particles belonging to the most massive sub-structure of a given friends-of-friends halo. We confirm that near-spherical and high-spin halos show enhanced clustering. The opposite is true for strongly aspherical and low-spin halos. Further, below the typical collapse mass, M*, more concentrated halos show stronger clustering whereas less concentrated halos are less clustered which is reversed for masses above M*. Going beyond earlier work we show that: (1) oblate halos are more strongly clustered than prolate ones; (2) the dependence of clustering on the shape of the velocity ellipsoid coincides with that of the real-space shape, although the signal is stronger; (3) halos with weak velocity anisotropy are more clustered, whereas radially anisotropic halos are more weakly clustered; (4) for all highly clustered subsets we find systematically less radially biased velocity anisotropy profiles. These findings indicate that the velocity structure of halos is tightly correlated with environment.