11:00–11:30 am ERC 401
Estimating Splashback Radius of Cluster-sized Dark Matter Halos
Advisor: Andrey Kravtsov
The outskirts of dark matter halos are predicted to have a sharp drop in its density profile that corresponds to the first apocenter of infalling particles. We present an algorithm to estimate this splashback radius of a cluster-sized dark matter halo in dark matter only simulations using only one snapshot. Within the algorithm, we implement the parameter estimation Cash statistic to characterize the density and change in density within radial bins with a local power law. We estimate the splashback radius in solid angle bins, and use the median as the estimate for a halo’s splashback radius. Despite only analyzing 5 cluster-sized halos, we reproduce relationships found from previous studies, namely ΓDK14 − Rsp/R200m and ΓDK14 − Msp/M200m. We find an instantaneous analog of the mass accretion rate with mass flux of infalling particles to predict Rsp/R200m for different mass accretion rates. We characterize that solid angle bins with a higher amount of infalling mass flux correlates with a lower splashback radius.