A Unified Halo Mass Function Across Dark Matter Models from High-Resolution Multi-Scale Simulations
Abstract
We measure the dark matter halo mass function, with backsplash halos removed, from a wide range of cosmological-box and zoom-in simulations. These include the MultiDark Planck boxes, along with a suite of zoom-in simulations of Group, Milky Way, and LMC-mass halos. The Milky Way simulations include both CDM and non-CDM initial conditions. Using these measurements, we calibrate the parameters of flexible fitting functions for the halo mass function and the window function, along with parameterized models for various systematics, including finite box size effects, halo isolation criteria, halo detection efficiency, and contamination by artificial halos (objects forming from particle noise in the initial conditions). We show that this model shows remarkable consistency with N-body simulations over a broad range of redshifts, and ten orders of magnitude in halo mass (106M⊙ to 1016M⊙). Our model typically maintains a high precision of 12% and captures complex behaviors, including small-scale cut-offs, oscillations, and enhancements. In specific mass intervals for certain power spectra, we see larger deviations of 40-50%. Furthermore, when integrated with a simple model for environmental dependence, this fitting function provides a robust description of how environmental density influences the halo mass function. This precision model captures a wide variety of dark matter paradigms (including thermal relics, axions, and models with dark-sector interactions), is accurate for halo masses down to 107M⊙, and is a critical ingredient for model-independent dark-matter inference from forthcoming data.
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BibTeX
@misc{benson2026unified,
title = {{A Unified Halo Mass Function Across Dark Matter Models from High-Resolution Multi-Scale Simulations}},
author = {Andrew J. Benson and Ethan O. Nadler and Xiaolong Du and Vera Gluscevic},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.12137},
eprint = {2606.12137},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12137},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Unified Halo Mass Function Across Dark Matter Models from High-Resolution Multi-Scale Simulations
AU - Andrew J. Benson
AU - Ethan O. Nadler
AU - Xiaolong Du
AU - Vera Gluscevic
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/15
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.12137
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12137
AB - We measure the dark matter halo mass function, with backsplash halos removed, from a wide range of cosmological-box and zoom-in simulations. These include the MultiDark Planck boxes, along with a suite of zoom-in simulations of Group, Milky Way, and LMC-mass halos. The Milky Way simulations include both CDM and non-CDM initial conditions. Using these measurements, we calibrate the parameters of flexible fitting functions for the halo mass function and the window function, along with parameterized models for various systematics, including finite box size effects, halo isolation criteria, halo detection efficiency, and contamination by artificial halos (objects forming from particle noise in the initial conditions). We show that this model shows remarkable consistency with N-body simulations over a broad range of redshifts, and ten orders of magnitude in halo mass (10^6M_⊙ to 10^16M_⊙). Our model typically maintains a high precision of 12% and captures complex behaviors, including small-scale cut-offs, oscillations, and enhancements. In specific mass intervals for certain power spectra, we see larger deviations of 40-50%. Furthermore, when integrated with a simple model for environmental dependence, this fitting function provides a robust description of how environmental density influences the halo mass function. This precision model captures a wide variety of dark matter paradigms (including thermal relics, axions, and models with dark-sector interactions), is accurate for halo masses down to 10^7M_⊙, and is a critical ingredient for model-independent dark-matter inference from forthcoming data.
ER -