Controlled Experiments on Dark-Matter Halo Structure and Galaxy Morphology I: What Sets Galaxy Sizes?

Abstract

The properties of galaxies are intricately linked to the characteristics of their host dark-matter haloes. We use a suite of controlled simulations of isolated galaxies to quantify how halo spin, concentration, inner density profile, and baryon fraction regulate galaxy sizes, at fixed halo mass of $M_{\rm{vir}}=10^{11} M_\odot$. We generate initial conditions of haloes and inhabitant spherical gas distributions in equilibrium, on a parameter grid spanned by these four halo parameters, and evolve the systems with the $\texttt{GIZMO}$ code and the $\texttt{FIRE-3}$ physics. The resulting half-mass radii of stars and cold baryons depend systematically on halo structure and baryon content: galaxy size increases with halo spin, decreases with halo concentration, is weakly sensitive to the inner density slope except in highly cuspy haloes, and is strongly suppressed at high baryon fractions. We evaluate the relative importance of the halo parameters on galaxy size using different metrics including the quadratic response-surface method and random-forest regression, and consistently find halo concentration to be the most informative predictor of size. The baryon fraction shows a subtle, non-monotonic impact on size, by modulating how galaxy size depends on halo spin. Our results clarify which secondary parameters of host dark-matter haloes dominate the scatter in galaxy sizes at the massive-dwarf mass scale.