Exploring the Core-galaxy Connection

Abstract

Halo core tracking is a novel concept designed to efficiently follow halo substructure in large simulations. We have recently developed this concept in gravity-only simulations to investigate the galaxy-halo connection in the context of empirical and semi-analytic models. Here, we incorporate information from hydrodynamics simulations, with an emphasis on establishing a connection between cores and galaxies. We compare cores across gravity-only, adiabatic hydrodynamics, and subgrid hydrodynamics simulations with the same initial phases. We demonstrate that cores are stable entities whose halo-centric radial profiles match across the simulations. We further develop a methodology that uses merging and infall mass cuts to group cores in the hydrodynamics simulation, creating on average, a one-to-one match to corresponding galaxies. We apply this methodology to cores from the gravity-only simulation, thus creating a proxy for galaxies which approximate the populations from the hydrodynamics simulation. Our results pave the way to incorporate inputs from smaller-scale hydrodynamics simulations directly into large-scale gravity-only runs in a principled manner.