The Bound Mass of Substructures in Dark Matter Halos

We present a new definition of subhalos in dissipationless dark matter N-body simulations, based on the coherent identification of their dynamically bound constituents. Whereas previous methods of determining the energetically bound components of a subhalo ignored the contribution of all the remaining particles in the halo ( those not geometrically or dynamically associated with the subhalo), our method allows for all the forces, both internal and external, exerted on the subhalo. We demonstrate, using the output of a simulation at different time steps, that our new method is more accurate at identifying the bound mass of a subhalo. We then compare our new method to previously adopted means of identifying subhalos by applying each to a sample of 1838 virialized halos extracted from a high-resolution cosmological simulation. We find that the subhalo distributions are similar in each case, and that the increase in the binding energy of a subhalo from including all the particles located within it is almost entirely balanced by the losses due to the external forces; the net increase in the mass fraction of subhalos is roughly 10%, and the extra substructures tend to reside in the inner parts of the system. Finally, we compare the subhalo populations of halos to the subsubhalo populations of subhalos, finding the two distributions to be similar. This is a new and interesting result, suggesting a self-similarity in the hierarchy substructures within cluster mass halos.