Paper detail

Mass function of haloes: scale invariant models

Press-Schechter theory gives a simple, approximate functional form of the mass function of dark matter haloes. Sheth and Tormen (ST) refined this mass function to give an improved analytical fit to results of N-body simulations. These forms of the halo mass function are universal (independent of cosmology and power spectrum) when scaled in suitable variables. Using large suites of LCDM N-body simulations, studies in the last few years have shown that this universality is only approximate. We explore whether some of the deviations from universality can be attributed to the power spectrum by computing the mass function in N-body simulations of various scale-free models in an Einstein-de Sitter cosmology. This choice of cosmology does not introduce any scale into the problem. These models have the advantage of being self-similar, hence stringent checks can be imposed while running these simulations. This set of numerical experiments is designed to isolate any power spectrum dependent departures from universality of mass functions. We show explicitly that the best fit ST parameters have a clear dependence on power spectrum. Our results also indicate that an improved analytical theory with more parameters is required in order to provide better fits to the mass function.