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The MassiveBlack-II simulation: the evolution of haloes and galaxies to z ∼ 0

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-03-23, 00:00 authored by Nishikanta Khandai, Tiziana Di MatteoTiziana Di Matteo, Rupert CroftRupert Croft, Stephen Wilkins, Yu Feng, Evan Tucker, Colin DeGraf, Mao-Sheng Liu

We investigate the properties of haloes, galaxies and black holes to z = 0 in the high-resolution hydrodynamical simulation MassiveBlack-II (MBII) which evolves a Λ cold dark matter cosmology in a comoving volumeVbox = (100 Mpc h−1)3. MBII is the highest resolution simulation of this size which includes a self-consistent model for star formation, black hole accretion and associated feedback. We provide a simulation browser web application which enables interactive search and tagging of the MBII data set and publicly release our galaxy catalogues. We find that baryons affect strongly the halo mass function (MF), with 20–33 per cent change in the halo abundance below the knee of the MF (Mhalo < 1013.2 Mh−1 at z = 0) when compared to dark-matter-only simulations. We provide a fitting function for the halo MF out to redshift z = 11 and discuss its limitations. We study the halo occupation distribution and clustering of galaxies, in particular the evolution and scale dependence of stochasticity and bias finding reasonable agreement with observational data. The shape of the cosmic spectral energy distribution of galaxies in MBII is consistent with observations, but lower in amplitude. The Galaxy stellar mass function (GSMF) function is broadly consistent with observations at z ≥ 2. At z < 2, the population of passive low-mass (M* < 109 M) galaxies in MBII makes the GSMF too steep compared to observations whereas at the high-mass end (M* > 1011 M) galaxies hosting bright AGNs make significant contributions to the GSMF. The quasar bolometric luminosity function is also largely consistent with observations. We note however that more efficient AGN feedback is necessary for the largest, rarest objects/clusters at low redshifts.

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© 2015 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press

Date

2015-03-23