Modeling the Anisotropic Tidal Effect on the Spin-Spin Correlations of Low-Mass Galactic Halos

Abstract

The halo spin-spin correlation function, $\eta(r)$, measures how rapidly the strength of the alignments of the spin directions between the neighbor halos change with the separation distance, $r$. The previous model based on the tidal torque theory expresses the halo spin-spin correlation function as a power of the linear density two-point correlation function, $\eta(r)\propto \xi^{n}(r)$, predicting $n=2$ in the linear regime and $n=1$ in the non-linear regime. Using a high-resolution N-body simulation, we show that the halo spin-spin correlation function in fact drops much less rapidly with $r$ than the prediction of the previous model, finding $\eta(r)$ to be statistically significant even at $r\ge 10\,h^{-1}$Mpc on the dwarf galaxy scale. Claiming that the anisotropic tidal effect is responsible for the failure of the previous model, we propose a new formula for the halo spin-spin correlation function expressed in terms of the integrals of $\xi(r)$. The new formula with the best-fit parameters turns out to agree excellently with the numerical results in a broad mass range, $0.05\le M/(10^{11}\,h^{-1}\,M_{\odot})\le 50$, describing well the large-scale tail of $\eta(r)$. We discuss a possibility of using the large-scale spin-spin correlations of the dwarf galactic halos as a complementary probe of dark matter.