Haloes going MAD

Haloes going MAD Haloes going MAD
  • Contact

    La Cristalera de Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

  • Registration costs

    No fee

  • Working language

    English

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  • Updated on 2010-02-07 15:08:00

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With the ever-growing possibilities to simulate cosmic structure formation on scales covering a substantial number of orders of magnitude (both in mass and in size), we feel the time is ripe to not only consider and talk about the credibility of the simulation technique but also about the methods of how to actually map the modeled density fields and its physical properties back onto observational quantities.

Traditionally this involves the utilization of “halo finders”, i.e. codes that mine the simulation data looking for gravitationally bound objects. These programs are nowadays equally sophisticated and come with their own intrinsic advantages and drawbacks. And while they have been primarily developed “on a side” tailored to suit the needs of individual simulation codes we now like to bring the experts in the fields under the same roof to discuss their methodologies.

During this workshop there will be presentations of the most commonly used halo finding techniques (spherical overdensity, friends-of-friends, phase-space finders, tessellation techniques, etc.), exchange of views on their applicability and - very importantly - hands-on sessions where various halo finders will be applied to the same data sets.

We are aiming at answering the following questions:

  • what is a halo and how to find it in a cosmological simution?
  • what is a subhalo and how to find it within its host halo?
  • how to cope with the amounts of data provided by state-of-the-art simulations?
  • how to post-process the halo catalogues, i.e. how to build merger trees, etc.?

If you have written a halo finder and/or are the end-user of a halo finder, we encourage you to register for this workshop and share your experience with the community. This workshop can only benefit from your contribution...

We also plan to have training sessions to teach novices how to use a particular halo finder!