Large-Scale Environmental Effects on the Mass Assembly of Dark Matter Halos

We examine large-scale environmental effects on the formation and the mass growth of dark matter halos. To facilitate this, we constructed dark matter halo merger trees from a cosmological N-body simulation, which enabled us to trace the merger information and the assembly history of individual halos. In fact, since the massive halos are more likely to be distributed in denser regions than in less dense regions (Mo & White, 1996), the large-scale environment dependence of the properties of halos can be partly originated from the halo mass effect. In order to avoid such contamination, caused by the mass dependence of halo properties, we carefully measured the local overdensity as the indicator of large-scale environment, which was calculated to be as independent of halo mass as possible. Small halos (${\sim}10^{11-12}M_{\odot}$), which usually host isolated single galaxies, show a notable difference on the formation time of galaxies depending on their large-scale environments, which reconfirms halo assembly bias (Gao & White, 2007). Furthermore, we investigate how this environmental effect on small halos is correlated with the mass assembly history of galaxies by using our semi-analytic model. We found that assembly bias in small halos does not have significant effects on the formation time or on the star formation history of galaxies residing in those halos except for the individual stellar mass of galaxies at z = 0. On average, isolated galaxies in high-density regions tend to be slightly more massive than those in low-density regions. Although the observational data from the current galaxy surveys is not yet sufficient for testing this prediction, future galaxy surveys will be able to explore these small galaxies more thoroughly.