Cold dark matter variant cosmological models — I. Simulations and preliminary comparisons

We present two matched sets of five simulations each, covering five presently favored simple modifications to the standard cold dark matter (CDM) scenario. One simulation suite, with a linear box size of 75 Mpc/h, is designed for high resolution and good statistics on the group/poor cluster scale, and the other, with a box size of 300 Mpc/h, is designed for good rich cluster statistics. All runs had 57 million cold particles, and models with massive neutrinos had an additional 113 million hot particles. We consider separately models with massive neutrinos, tilt, curvature, and a nonzero cosmological constant in addition to the standard CDM model. We find that our tilted Omega+OmegaLambda=1 (TLCDM) model produces too much small-scale power by a factor of ~3, and our open Lambda=0 (OCDM) model also exceeds observed small-scale power by a factor of 2. In addition, we take advantage of the large dynamic range in detectable halo masses our simulations allow to check the shape of the Press-Schechter approximation. We find good fits at cluster masses for deltac=1. 27--1. 35 for a Gaussian filter and deltac=1. 57--1. 73 for a tophat filter. However, Press-Schechter overpredicts the number density of halos compared to the simulations in the high resolution suite by a weakly cosmology-dependent factor of 1. 5--2 at galaxy and group masses, which cannot be fixed by adjusting deltac within reasonable bounds. An appendix generalizes the spherical collapse model to any isotropic cosmology.