Paper detail

Disk Sizes in a LCDM Universe

We introduce a model which uses semi-analytic techniques to trace formation and evolution of galaxy disks in their cosmological context. For the first time we model the growth of gas and stellar disks separately. In contrast to previous work we follow in detail the angular momentum accumulation history through the gas cooling, merging and star formation processes. Our model successfully reproduces the stellar mass--radius distribution and gas-to-stellar disk size ratio distribution observed locally. We also investigate the dependence of clustering on galaxy size and find qualitative agreement with observation. There is still some discrepancy at small scale for less massive galaxies, indicating that our treatment of satellite galaxies needs to be improved.