Paper detail

Theoretical dark matter halo substructure

In two previous papers (Salvador-Solé 2012a,b), it was shown that: i) the typical structural and kinematic properties of haloes in (bottom-up) hierarchical cosmologies endowed with random Gaussian density perturbations of dissipationless collisionless dark matter emerge naturally from the typical properties of peaks in the primordial density field and ii) halo statistics are well described by the peak formalism. In the present paper, we use these results to model halo substructure. Specifically, making use of the peak formalism and the fact that accreting haloes evolve from the inside-out, we derive the subhalo mass abundance and number density profile per infinitesimal mass for subhaloes of different masses, as a function of the subhalo maximum circular velocity or mass, before and after the tidal truncation of subhaloes by the host potential well. The subhalo properties obtained by assuming that subhaloes are mainly made of diffuse particles are in very good agreement with those found in current high-resolution N-body simulations. We also predict the subhalo properties in the opposite extreme case, likely better suited for the real universe in CDM cosmologies, that haloes are made of subhaloes within subhaloes at all scales.