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Publication

Beyond Mass: Detecting Secondary Halo Properties with Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing

Authors

Xhakaj, Enia; Leauthaud, Alexie; Lange, Johannes; Hearin, Andrew; Diemer, Benedikt; Dalal, Neal

Abstract

Secondary halo properties beyond mass, such as the mass accretion rate (MAR), concentration, and the half mass scale, are essential in understanding the formation of large-scale structure and dark matter haloes. In this paper, we study the impact of secondary halo properties on the galaxy-galaxy lensing observable, Delta sigma. We build an emulator trained on N-body simulations to model Delta sigma and quantify the impact of different secondary parameters on the Delta sigma profile. We focus on the impact of MAR on Delta sigma. We show that a 3 sigma detection of variations in MAR at fixed halo mass could be achieved with the Hyper Suprime Cam survey assuming no baryonic effects and a proxy for MAR with scatter <1.5. We show that the full radial profile of Delta sigma depends on secondary properties at fixed halo mass. Consequently, an emulator that can perform full shape fitting yields better than two times improvement upon the constraints on MAR than only using the outer part of the halo. Finally, we highlight that miscentring and MAR impact the radial profile of Delta sigma in a similar fashion, implying that miscentring and MAR need to be modelled jointly for unbiased estimates of both effects. We show that present-day lensing data sets have the statistical capability to place constraints on halo MAR within our assumptions. Our analysis opens up new possibilities for observationally measuring the assembly history of the dark matter haloes that host galaxies and clusters.