Does correcting mass accretion histories affect secondary bias in a high resolution n-body simulation?

We study the phenomenon of secondary (or ‘assembly’) bias, whereby dark matter halos of the same mass exhibit clustering that depends on secondary properties like age or concentration. Though the exact causes of secondary bias are not fully understood, they are likely connected to the influence that neighboring halos have on each others’ growth over time. In particular, some halos experience ‘arrested development’, where their mass growth is inhibited due to the tidal fields of surrounding structures. In this work, we explore to what extent halo secondary bias vanishes if we “correct” halo masses to remove this arrested development. We use a high resolution cosmological N-body simulation and we employ several approaches for “correcting” mass accretion histories, including matching them to those of halos in a low tidal field, or extrapolating their early mass growth to the present time. By testing this simple hypothesis, we hope to improve our understanding of halo assembly bias.