arXiv subjects

Fuyu Dong

Publications and source records attributed to Fuyu Dong.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Y-BotFrame: An Extensible Embodied Agent Framework for Quadruped Robot Assistants

Quadruped robots are capable of traversing a wide range of complex terrains with high flexibility. As highly mobile ground-based intelligent platforms, they can be equipped with modules for navigation control, environmental perception, and intelligent interaction, thereby serving as real-world mobile deployment platforms for various algorithms. In this paper, we introduce Y-BotFrame, an extensible embodied platform that turns a robot into an intelligent ground assistant. Y-BotFrame integrates multimodal perception capabilities, including speech, vision, and LiDAR, and employs a large language model as the cognitive core for environmental understanding, contextual reasoning, and task planning. The system maps user natural-language instructions into executable embodied task units that can be carried out by the robot. Y-BotFrame supports natural interaction through voice commands and visual feedback, removing the need for a remote controller and enabling efficient human-robot collaboration. With a highly extensible framework, Y-BotFrame supports plug-and-play integration of new functional modules as well as modular upgrades and iterative development, offering a reference implementation for the real-world deployment of general-purpose, instruction-driven embodied agents.The supplementary video is available at https://xdei-group.github.io/Y-BotFrame/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Synergy between the gravitational potential decay rate and other structure growth probes in testing gravity

We test gravity by exploiting the synergy between the gravitational potential decay rate ($\mathit{DR}$) and complementary structure-growth probes: these observables respond to MG parameters with different degeneracy directions, so their combination yields stronger constraints than any single probe. We adopt the tomographic $\mathit{DR}$ measurements reported in \citep{2025ApJ...982...99D} and combine them with CMB-lensing-tomography $\Sigma_8$ measurements and $f\sigma_8$ measurements from DESI DR1 full-shape analyses and the DESI peculiar-velocity field. We apply this joint data vector to two representative frameworks: phenomenological parameterizations and the Effective Field Theory (EFT) $\alpha$-basis. For the phenomenological form $P_{\rm MG}(a)=1+P_{{\rm MG},0}\,\Omega_{\rm DE}(a)/\Omega_{\rm DE}(0)$, where $P_{\rm MG}$ denotes $\mu$, $\eta$, or $\Sigma$, we obtain $\mu_0=0.09\pm0.35$ and $\Sigma_0=0.01\pm0.06$. Compared to the measurements combination $\Sigma_8+f\sigma_8$, including $\mathit{DR}$ tightens the constraint on $\Sigma_0$ by a factor of $\sim2$. For the $(\mu_0,\eta_0)$ case we find $\mu_0=0.06^{+0.17}_{-0.23}$ and $\eta_0=-0.03^{+0.36}_{-0.46}$; relative to $\Sigma_8+f\sigma_8$, adding $\mathit{DR}$ improves the constraints on both parameters by a factor of $\sim1.5$. In the EFT $\alpha$-basis, adopting the parameterization $\alpha_i(a)=c_i\,\Omega_{\rm DE}(a)$ with $i\in\{{\rm M,B}\}$, we find $c_{\rm M}=0.64^{+0.32}_{-0.72}$ and $c{\rm B}=0.31^{+0.19}_{-0.29}$. The corresponding EFT uncertainties are about a factor of $\sim2$ smaller than those reported in \citep{2025JCAP...09..053I}, which combined DESI full-shape and BAO measurements with DES-SN5YR and CMB data. These results demonstrate the capability of $\mathit{DR}$ and the necessity of including the $\mathit{DR}$ measurements in testing gravity.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2026

Closing the Observational Gap in Cosmic Dynamics: AI-Enabled Reconstruction of the Universe's Vorticity and Rotational Flow Morphology

The cosmic vorticity field, an essential tracer of nonlinear structure formation, has remained observationally inaccessible because transverse galaxy motions are difficult to measure and analytic models struggle to capture shell-crossing. Here we report an empirical reconstruction of this field by applying an artificial intelligence framework trained on simulations of the concordance LambdaCDM model to Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies. The recovered three-dimensional velocity and vorticity fields reveal coherent vortical structures, including spiral flows in clusters, filaments, and voids, and the cosmic web inferred from vorticity closely matches that derived from density segmentation. The power spectra of the reconstructed velocity and vorticity fields agree statistically with LambdaCDM predictions, and the inferred velocity field effectively removes redshift-space distortions, yielding an almost isotropic clustering signal. These converging lines of evidence, obtained from an independent perspective, reinforce the concordance cosmological model. By closing a long-standing observational gap, our results highlight the potential of AI-driven reconstruction to access otherwise unobservable quantities and to address fundamental questions in cosmology and galaxy formation.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Improving Few-Shot Change Detection Visual Question Answering via Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Change detection visual question answering (CDVQA) requires answering text queries by reasoning about semantic changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images. A straightforward approach is to boost CDVQA performance with generic vision-language models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Despite recent progress, we observe that a significant portion of failures do not stem from clearly incorrect predictions, but from decision ambiguity, where the model assigns similar confidence to the correct answer and strong distractors. To formalize this challenge, we define Decision-Ambiguous Samples (DAS) as instances with a small probability margin between the ground-truth answer and the most competitive alternative. We argue that explicitly optimizing DAS is crucial for improving the discriminability and robustness of CDVQA models. To this end, we propose DARFT, a Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning framework that first mines DAS using an SFT-trained reference policy and then applies group-relative policy optimization on the mined subset. By leveraging multi-sample decoding and intra-group relative advantages, DARFT suppresses strong distractors and sharpens decision boundaries without additional supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains over SFT baselines, particularly under few-shot settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Constraining gravity with the decay rate of cosmological gravitational potential

A key task in cosmology is to test the validity of general relativity (GR) at cosmological scales and, therefore, to distinguish between dark energy and modified gravity (MG) as the driver of the late-time cosmic acceleration. The decay rate ($DR$) of cosmological gravitational potential, being sensitive to gravity and being immune to various astrophysical uncertainties, enables GR tests independent to other structure growth probes. Recently we have measured $DR$ at $0.2\leq z\leq 1.4$, combining the DR9 galaxy catalog from the DESI imaging surveys and Planck cosmic microwave background maps \citep{arXiv:2411.12594}. Here we use this measurement to test gravity, and restrict the analysis to one-parameter extensions to the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. We consider four one-parameter MG parameterizations. One is $f(a)=\Omega_m^\gamma(a)$. The other three adopt the gravitational slip parameter $\eta=1$ and consider variations in the effective gravitational constant $G_{\rm eff}/G$ with the parameterization $\Sigma(a)=\Sigma_\Lambda \Omega_\Lambda(a)/\Omega_\Lambda$, $\Sigma(a)=\Sigma_1 a$ or $\Sigma(a)=\Sigma_2 a^2$. We find $\gamma=0.47^{+0.22}_{-0.15}$, consistent with the GR prediction $\gamma\simeq 0.55$. We also find $\Sigma_\Lambda=0.018^{+0.052}_{-0.053}$, $\Sigma_1=0.020^{+0.065}_{-0.062}$, and $\Sigma_2=0.027^{+0.067}_{-0.069}$, fully consistent with the GR case of $\Sigma=0$, regardless of parameterizations of $\Sigma(a)$. The constraining power is already competitive, while a factor of 2 further improvement is expected for the upcoming full-sky galaxy surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

The Most Probable Behaviour of the Dark Energy Equation of State Indicates a Thawing Quintessence Field: Tomographic Alcock-Paczy\'nski Test with Redshift-Space Correlation Function II

We apply an extended Alcock-Paczy\'nski (AP) test to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data to constrain the dark energy models with the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder (CPL) parametrization of the dark energy equation of state. The extended AP test method uses the full shape of redshift-space two-point correlation funcion(CF) as the standard shape in order to measure the expansion history of the universe. We calibrate the standard shape by using the cosmology-dependent nonlinear evolution of the CF shape in the Multiverse simulations. Further validation of the method and calibration of possible systematics are performed based on mock samples from the Horizon Run 4 simulation. Using the AP test alone, we constrain the flat CDM plus CPL-type dark energy model (flat $w^{\rm CPL}$CDM) to have $\Omega_m=0.290_{-0.031}^{+0.029}$, $w_0=-0.800_{-0.100}^{+0.208}$, and $w_a=-0.238_{-0.972}^{+0.650}$. When combined with other results from the low-redshift universe, such as the Pantheon$+$ supernova compilation and DESI BAO data, the constraint on dark energy becomes $w_0=-0.857_{-0.042}^{+0.051}$, and $w_a=-0.153_{-0.356}^{+0.347}$. The best-fit $w^{CPL}(z)$ suggests no phantom-divide crossing at $z<0.7$, and the dark energy behaviour is consistent with a thawing quintessence field. It is only when the CMB data are combined with late-time cosmological probes that a phantom-divide crossing at low redshift is favored.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

RSVG-ZeroOV: Exploring a Training-Free Framework for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing Images

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize objects in remote sensing images based on free-form natural language expressions. Existing approaches are typically constrained to closed-set vocabularies, limiting their applicability in open-world scenarios. While recent attempts to leverage generic foundation models for open-vocabulary RSVG, they overly rely on expensive high-quality datasets and time-consuming fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{RSVG-ZeroOV}, a training-free framework that aims to explore the potential of frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. Specifically, RSVG-ZeroOV comprises three key stages: (i) Overview: We utilize a vision-language model (VLM) to obtain cross-attention\footnote[1]{In this paper, although decoder-only VLMs use self-attention over all tokens, we refer to the image-text interaction part as cross-attention to distinguish it from pure visual self-attention.}maps that capture semantic correlations between text queries and visual regions. (ii) Focus: By leveraging the fine-grained modeling priors of a diffusion model (DM), we fill in gaps in structural and shape information of objects, which are often overlooked by VLM. (iii) Evolve: A simple yet effective attention evolution module is introduced to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified segmentation masks over the referred objects. Without cumbersome task-specific training, RSVG-ZeroOV offers an efficient and scalable solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing weakly-supervised and zero-shot methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Constraining $\sigma_8$ with Lensing Statistics in Low and High Density Regions

Lensing studies are typically carried out around high density regions, such as groups and clusters, where the lensing signals are significant and indicative of rich density structures. However, a more comprehensive test of the cosmological model should also include the lensing effect in low density regions. In this work, we incorporate the stacked weak lensing signals around the low density positions, alongside galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy-galaxy two point correlation function to perform a joint cosmological analysis on $\sigma_8$. The low density positions are constructed from the DR9 data release of the DESI legacy imaging survey, using galaxies with r-band absolute magnitude cut M$<$-21.5 and in the redshift range of 0.18$<$z$<$0.28. In doing so, we simultaneously parameterize photometric redshift errors and halo mass uncertainties while building mock catalogs from simulations using the method of SubHalo Abundance Matching (SHAM). For the weak lensing measurements, we use the shear estimators derived from the DECaLS DR8 imaging data, processed by the Fourier_Quad pipeline. The survey boundaries and masks are fully taken into account. Our analysis achieves a total significance of $31.1\sigma$ detection for lensing in the low density positions, which significantly improve the $\sigma_8$ constraint compared to galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy-galaxy two point correlation function by 14$\%$. For flat $\Lambda$CDM model, we constrain $\sigma_8$ =$0.824^{+0.015}_{-0.015}$, which shows a good agreement with the PLANCK result. Additionally, the halo mass uncertainty $\sigma_{\lg M}$ and photometric redshift error $\sigma_z$ are constrained to be $0.565^{+0.086}_{-0.070}$ and $0.004^{+0.004}_{-0.003}$ respectively, which are somewhat different from our expectations due to the significant degeneracy of the two parameters.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Self-similar decomposition of the hierarchical merger tree of dark matter halos

In the $\Lambda$CDM universe, structure formation is generally not a self-similar process, while some self-similarity remains in certain statistics which can greatly simplify our description and understanding of the cosmic structures. In this work, we show that the merger tree of dark matter halos is approximately self-similar by investigating the universality of the subhalo peak mass function (PMF) describing the mass distribution of progenitor halos. Using a set of cosmological simulations and identifying subhalos of different merger levels with HBT+, we verify that the level-1 subhalo PMF is close to universal across halo mass, redshift, and cosmology. This approximate self-similarity allows us to analytically derive the subhalo PMF for subhalos accreted at any level (i.e., for sub-sub...halos) through self-convolutions of the level-1 PMF, and the resulting model shows good agreement with simulation measurements. We further derive a number of analytical properties on the hierarchical origin of subhalos. We show that higher-level subhalos dominate at progressively lower peak mass in the PMF and are more likely to originate from major mergers than lower-level ones. At a given merger mass ratio, the subhalo accretion rates at each level track the growth rate of the host halo. At a fixed final mass ratio, however, subhalos of higher-level, higher-mass-ratio and in more massive haloes tend to be accreted more recently. Matching subhalo peak mass to galaxy mass, these results have direct implications on the hierarchical origin of satellite galaxies.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

The direct measurement of gravitational potential decay rate at cosmological scales II -- Improved dark energy constraint from $z\le1.4$

The gravitational potential decay rate (DR) is caused by the cosmic acceleration of the universe, providing a direct probe into the existence of dark energy (DE). We present measurements of DR and explore its implications for DE models using the Data Release 9 galaxy catalog of DESI imaging surveys and the Planck cosmic microwave background maps. Our analysis includes six redshift bins within the range of $0.2\le z<1.4$ and achieves a total significance of 3.1$\sigma$, extending the DR measurements to a much higher redshift comparing to Dong et al. (2022), which focused on $0.2\le z<0.8$. Other improvements involve addressing potential systematics in the DR-related measurements of correlation functions, including imaging systematics and magnification bias. We explore the constraining power of DR both the $w$CDM model and the $w_0w_a$CDM model. We find that, the addition of DR can significantly improves DE constraints, over Sloan Digital Sky Survey baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data alone or PantheonPlus supernovae (SNe) compilation alone, although it shows only a modest improvement for DESI BAO. In the $w$CDM model, all three probes-DR, DESI BAO and SNe-favor $w=-1$. For the $w_0w_a$CDM, while DESI BAO prefers $w_0>-1$ and $w_a<0$, SNe Ia and DR data constrain $w_0=-0.94^{+0.11}_{-0.13}$ and $w_a=-0.22^{+0.57}_{-0.97}$. Namely SNe Ia and DR data has no preference on dynamical dark energy over $\Lambda$.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Show Me What and Where has Changed? Question Answering and Grounding for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Remote sensing change detection aims to perceive changes occurring on the Earth's surface from remote sensing data in different periods, and feed these changes back to humans. However, most existing methods only focus on detecting change regions, lacking the capability to interact with users to identify changes that the users expect. In this paper, we introduce a new task named Change Detection Question Answering and Grounding (CDQAG), which extends the traditional change detection task by providing interpretable textual answers and intuitive visual evidence. To this end, we construct the first CDQAG benchmark dataset, termed QAG-360K, comprising over 360K triplets of questions, textual answers, and corresponding high-quality visual masks. It encompasses 10 essential land-cover categories and 8 comprehensive question types, which provides a valuable and diverse dataset for remote sensing applications. Furthermore, we present VisTA, a simple yet effective baseline method that unifies the tasks of question answering and grounding by delivering both visual and textual answers. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the classic change detection-based visual question answering (CDVQA) and the proposed CDQAG datasets. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results provide useful insights for developing better CDQAG models, and we hope that our work can inspire further research in this important yet underexplored research field. The proposed benchmark dataset and method are available at https://github.com/like413/VisTA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

An unbiased method of measuring the ratio of two data sets

In certain cases of astronomical data analysis, the meaningful physical quantity to extract is the ratio $R$ between two data sets. Examples include the lensing ratio, the interloper rate in spectroscopic redshift samples, the decay rate of gravitational potential and $E_G$ to test gravity. However, simply taking the ratio of the two data sets is biased, since it renders (even statistical) errors in the denominator into systematic errors in $R$. Furthermore, it is not optimal in minimizing statistical errors of $R$. Based on Bayesian analysis and the usual assumption of Gaussian error in the data, we derive an analytical expression of the posterior PDF $P(R)$. This result enables fast and unbiased $R$ measurement, with minimal statistical errors. Furthermore, it relies on no underlying model other than the proportionality relation between the two data sets. Even more generally, it applies to the cases where the proportionality relation holds for the underlying physics/statistics instead of the two data sets directly. It also applies to the case of multiple ratios ($R\rightarrow {\bf R}=(R_1,R_2,\cdots)$). We take the lensing ratio as an example to demonstrate our method. We take lenses as DESI imaging survey galaxies, and sources as DECaLS cosmic shear and \emph{Planck} CMB lensing. We restrict the analysis to the ratio between CMB lensing and cosmic shear. The resulting $P(R)$, for multiple lens-shear pairs, are all nearly Gaussian. The S/N of measured $R$ ranges from $4.9$ to $8.4$. We perform several tests to verify the robustness of the above result.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2023

Tomographic Alcock-Paczynski Test with Redshift-Space Correlation Function: Evidence for the Dark Energy Equation of State Parameter w>-1

The apparent shape of galaxy clustering depends on the adopted cosmology used to convert observed redshift to comoving distance, the $r(z)$ relation, as it changes the line elements along and across the line of sight differently. The Alcock-Paczyński (AP) test exploits this property to constrain the expansion history of the universe. We present an extensive review of past studies on the AP test. We adopt an extended AP test method introduced by Park et al. (2019), which uses the full shape of redshift-space two-point correlation function (CF) as the standard shape, and apply it to the SDSS DR7, BOSS, and eBOSS LRG samples covering the redshift range up to $z=0.8$.We calibrate the test against the nonlinear cosmology-dependent systematic evolution of the CF shape using the Multiverse simulations. We focus on examining whether or not the flat $Λ$CDM `concordance' model is consistent with observation. We constrain the flat $w$CDM model to have $w=-0.892_{-0.050}^{+0.045}$ and $Ω_m=0.282_{-0.023}^{+0.024}$ from our AP test alone, which is significantly tighter than the constraints from the BAO or SNe I$a$ methods by a factor of 3 - 6. When the AP test result is combined with the recent BAO and SNe I$a$ results, we obtain $w=-0.903_{-0.023}^{+0.023}$ and $Ω_m=0.285_{-0.009}^{+0.014}$. This puts a strong tension with the flat $Λ$CDM model with $w=-1$ at $4.2σ$ level. Consistency with $w=-1$ is obtained only when the Planck CMB observation is combined. It remains to see if this tension between observations of galaxy distribution at low redshifts and CMB anisotropy at the decoupling epoch becomes greater in the future studies and leads us to a new paradigm of cosmology.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

The first direct measurement of gravitational potential decay rate at cosmological scales and improved dark energy constraint

The integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect probes the decay rate ($DR$) of large scale gravitational potential and therefore provides unique constraint on dark energy (DE). However its constraining power is degraded by the ISW measurement, which relies on cross-correlating with the large scale structure (LSS) and suffers from uncertainties in galaxy bias and matter clustering. In combination with lensing-LSS cross-correlation, $DR$ can be isolated in a way free of uncertainties in galaxy bias and matter clustering. We applied this proposal to the combination of the DR8 galaxy catalogue of DESI imaging surveys and Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps. We achieved the first $DR$ measurement, with a total significance of $3.2σ$. We verified the measurements at three redshift bins ($[0.2,0.4)$, $[0.4, 0.6)$, $[0.6,0.8]$), with two LSS tracers (the "low-density points" and the conventional galaxy positions). Despite its relatively low S/N, the addition of $DR$ significantly improves dark energy constraints, over SDSS baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data alone or Pantheon supernovae (SN) compilation alone. For flat $w$CDM cosmology, the improvement in the precision of $Ω_m$ is a factor of 1.8 over BAO and 1.5 over SN. For the DE equation of state $w$, the improvement factor is 1.3 over BAO and 1.4 over SN. These improvements demonstrate $DR$ as a useful cosmological probe, and therefore we advocate its usage in future cosmological analysis.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Halo Properties and Mass Functions of Groups/Clusters from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys DR9

Based on a large group/cluster catalog recently constructed from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys DR9 using an extended halo-based group finder, we measure and model the group-galaxy weak lensing signals for groups/clusters in a few redshift bins within redshift range $0.1 \leqslant z<0.6$. Here, the background shear signals are obtained based on the DECaLS survey shape catalog derived with the \textsc{Fourier\_Quad} method. We divide the lens samples into 5 equispaced redshift bins and 7 mass bins, which allow us to probe the redshift and mass dependence of the lensing signals and hence the resulting halo properties. In addition to these sample selections, we have also checked the signals around different group centers, e.g., brightest central galaxy (BCG), luminosity weighted center and number weighted center. We use a lensing model that includes off-centering to describe the lensing signals we measure for all mass and redshift bins. The results demonstrate that our model predictions for the halo masses, bias and concentrations are stable and self-consistent among different samples for different group centers. Taking advantage of the very large and complete sample of groups/clusters, as well as the reliable estimation of their halo masses, we provide measurements of the cumulative halo mass functions up to redshift $z=0.6$, with a mass precision at $0.03\sim0.09$ dex.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Shear Measurement with Poorly Resolved Images

Weak lensing studies typically require excellent seeing conditions for the purpose of maximizing the number density of well-resolved galaxy images. It is interesting to ask to what extent the seeing size limits the usefulness of the astronomical images in weak lensing. In this work, we study this issue with the data of the DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS), which is a part of the target selection program for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Using the Fourier Quad shear measurement pipeline, we demonstrate that images with relatively poor seeing conditions (around 1.5 arcsec) can still yield accurate shear estimators. We do not find any correlation between systematic shear error and the image resolution.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

An Extended Halo-based Group/Cluster finder: application to the DESI legacy imaging surveys DR8

We extend the halo-based group finder developed by \citet[][]{Yang2005a} to use data {\it simultaneously} with either photometric or spectroscopic redshifts. A mock galaxy redshift survey constructed from a high-resolution N-body simulation is used to evaluate the performance of this extended group finder. For galaxies with magnitude ${\rm z\le 21}$ and redshift $0<z\le 1.0$ in the DESI legacy imaging surveys (the Legacy Surveys), our group finder successfully identifies more than 60\% of the members in about $90\%$ of halos with mass $\ga 10^{12.5}\msunh$. Detected groups with mass $\ga 10^{12.0}\msunh$ have a purity (the fraction of true groups) greater than 90\%. The halo mass assigned to each group has an uncertainty of about 0.2 dex at the high mass end $\ga 10^{13.5}\msunh$ and 0.40 dex at the low mass end. Groups with more than 10 members have a redshift accuracy of $\sim 0.008$. We apply this group finder to the Legacy Surveys DR8 and find 5.2 Million groups with at least 3 members. About 387,000 of these groups have at least 10 members. The resulting catalog containing 3D coordinates, richness, halo masses, and total group luminosities, is made publicly available.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2022

The Universal Specific Merger Rate of Dark Matter Halos

We employ a set of high resolution N-body simulations to study the merger rate of dark matter halos. We define a specific merger rate by normalizing the average number of mergers per halo with the logarithmic mass growth change of the hosts at the time of accretion. Based on the simulation results, we find that this specific merger rate, $\mathrm{d}N_{\mathrm{merge}}(ξ|M,z)/\mathrm{d}ξ/\mathrm{d}\log M(z)$, has a universal form, which is only a function of the mass ratio of merging halo pairs, $ξ$, and does not depend on the host halo mass, $M$, or redshift, $z$, over a wide range of masses ($10^{12}\lesssim M \lesssim10^{14}\,M_\odot/h$) and merger ratios ($ξ\ge 1e-2$). We further test with simulations of different $Ω_m$ and $σ_8$, and get the same specific merger rate. The universality of the specific merger rate shows that halos in the universe are built up self-similarly, with a universal composition in the mass contributions and an absolute merger rate that grows in proportion to the halo mass growth. As a result, the absolute merger rate relates with redshift and cosmology only through the halo mass variable, whose evolution can be readily obtained from the universal mass accretion history (MAH) model of \cite{2009ApJ...707..354Z}. Lastly, we show that this universal specific merger rate immediately predicts an universal un-evolved subhalo mass function that is independent on the redshift, MAH or the final halo mass, and vice versa.

astro-ph.CO↗