Is the spherical-collapse model of halo formation useful?

Alexander Mead (UBC)

March 23, 2017

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Abstract: I will discuss differences in non-linear structure formation between cosmological models that are designed so as to share a linear-theory power spectrum at redshift zero, but that differ in their growth histories. Simulations of these cosmologies are seen to share a large-scale structure skeleton, but differ in the details of their halo populations. I will demonstrate that these differences can be largely understood via the cosmology dependence of spherical-collapse-model predictions for the formation times and average densities of the haloes.