Future evolution of the Halo Mass function in a Universe dominated by a cosmological constant

Matias Carrasco Kind, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Given the latest evidence, we live in an accelerated expanding universe which is dominated by a cosmological constant. In the distant future, dark energy will dominate the evolution of large-scale structures. Based on a simple theoretical criterion, we can determine the limits of gravitationally-bound, dark-matter halos in their critical shells for well virialized haloes. 70 billion years into the future (scale factor a=100), this criterion predicts that the density inside the last bound shell has to be twice the critical density of the universe at that time. With help from Blue Waters, we will apply this criterion far into the future by using N-body simulations of dark matter particles where almost all of the halos are fully virialized and "frozen" in the cosmic web and trace back the particles to the present. This simulation will produce a halo mass function that will reach an asymptotic form, from which we can extract useful information to constrain the large-scale structures we observe today and put constraints on current cosmological models.