The Impact of Box Size on the Properties of Dark Matter Haloes in Cosmological Simulations

Abstract

We investigate the impact finite simulation box size has on the structural and kinematic properties of Cold Dark Matter haloes forming in cosmological simulations. Our approach involves generating a single realisation of the initial power spectrum of density perturbations and studying how truncation of this power spectrum on scales larger than L_cut affects the structure of dark matter haloes at z=0. In particular, we have examined the cases of L_cut = f_cut L_box with f_cut=1 (i.e. no truncation), 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4. In common with previous studies, we find that the suppression of long wavelength perturbations reduces the strength of clustering, as measured by a suppression of the 2-point correlation function xi(r), and reduces the numbers of the most massive haloes, as reflected in the depletion of the high mass end of the mass function n(M). Interestingly, we find that truncation has little impact on the internal properties of haloes. The masses of high mass haloes decrease in a systematic manner as L_cut is reduced, but the distribution of concentrations is unaffected. On the other hand, the median spin parameter is ~50% lower in runs with f_cut<1. We argue that this is an imprint of the linear growth phase of the halo's angular momentum by tidal torquing, and that the absence of any measurable trend in concentration and the weak trend observed in halo shape reflect the importance of virialisation and complex mass accretion histories for these quantities. These results are of interest for studies that require high mass resolution and statistical samples of simulated haloes, such as simulations of the population of first stars. Our analysis shows that large-scale tidal fields have relatively little effect on the internal properties of Cold Dark Matter haloes and hence may be ignored in such studies.