Quickstart guide to analyzing halo catalogs

In this section of the documentation we’ll give a quick demonstration of how information in Halotools-formatted halo catalogs is organized. In particular, you’ll see how to access both halo catalog metadata as well as the Astropy Table storing the tabular halo data.

For more in-depth information about how to analyze halo catalogs, see the Tutorials on analyzing halo catalogs section of the documentation. This quickstart guide assumes you have followed the Getting started with Halotools section of the documentation, so that you already have the default halo catalog stored on your machine.

Loading cached halo catalogs into memory

To load the default halo catalog into memory, just instantiate the CachedHaloCatalog class with no arguments:

from halotools.sim_manager import CachedHaloCatalog
halocat = CachedHaloCatalog()

You may find it useful to read the documentation of the CachedHaloCatalog class together with this quickstart guide.

The default halo catalog in Halotools is the redshift-zero Bolshoi simulation with halos identified using Rockstar. This is reflected in the metadata of the halo catalog:

print(halocat.simname, halocat.halo_finder, halocat.redshift)
('bolshoi', 'rockstar', -0.0003)

Loading alternative catalogs

As described in the documentation on the CachedHaloCatalog class, you can access any cached halo catalog using the same syntax as above, but using keyword arguments to specify which cached catalog you’d like. For example, if you have used the halotools/scripts/download_additional_halocat.py script to download the Bolshoi-Planck z = 0.5 snapshot, then you can load that catalog into memory as follows:

halocat = CachedHaloCatalog(simname = 'bolplanck', redshift = 0.5)

Note that the CachedHaloCatalog class works with any Halotools-formatted halo catalog stored in any disk location, not just Halotools-provided snapshots stored in the default cache location. This includes your own reductions of the publicly available Rockstar catalogs and/or your own proprietary simulation with halos identified by whatever method you prefer.

Organization of halo information

A Halotools-formatted halo catalog comes equipped with both the tabular data associated with the halos, and metadata about the simulation snapshot. In this quickstart guide, we’ll demonstrate how to access both kinds of information in the two sections below.

Accessing the tabular data storing the halo catalog

The catalog of halos itself is stored as the halo_table attribute in the form of an Astropy Table object:

halos = halocat.halo_table

To see what halo properties are available, you can use the keys method, just like a python dictionary

print(halos.keys())
['halo_vmax_firstacc', 'halo_dmvir_dt_tdyn', 'halo_macc', 'halo_scale_factor', 'halo_vmax_mpeak', 'halo_m_pe_behroozi', 'halo_xoff', 'halo_spin', 'halo_scale_factor_firstacc', 'halo_c_to_a', 'halo_mvir_firstacc', 'halo_scale_factor_last_mm', 'halo_scale_factor_mpeak', 'halo_pid', 'halo_m500c', 'halo_id', 'halo_halfmass_scale_factor', 'halo_upid', 'halo_t_by_u', 'halo_rvir', 'halo_vpeak', 'halo_dmvir_dt_100myr', 'halo_mpeak', 'halo_m_pe_diemer', 'halo_jx', 'halo_jy', 'halo_jz', 'halo_m2500c', 'halo_mvir', 'halo_voff', 'halo_axisA_z', 'halo_axisA_x', 'halo_axisA_y', 'halo_y', 'halo_b_to_a', 'halo_x', 'halo_z', 'halo_m200b', 'halo_vacc', 'halo_scale_factor_lastacc', 'halo_vmax', 'halo_m200c', 'halo_vx', 'halo_vy', 'halo_vz', 'halo_dmvir_dt_inst', 'halo_rs', 'halo_nfw_conc', 'halo_hostid', 'halo_mvir_host_halo']

You can read about the conventions used to define subhalos vs. host halos in the Rockstar halo and subhalo nomenclature conventions section of the documentation. For a thorough discussion of the meaning of each column in these halo catalogs, see the appendix of Rodriguez Puebla et al 2016.

You can select a particular sample of halos using a Numpy boolean mask:

mask = (halos['halo_mvir'] > 1e12) & (halos['halo_mvir'] < 2e12) & (halos['halo_upid'] == -1)
milky_way_halos = halos[mask]

Accessing the snapshot metadata

All metadata associated with a Halotools-formatted halo catalog is accessible via attributes of the CachedHaloCatalog object.

print(halocat.redshift, halocat.Lbox)
(0.4966, 250.0)

The Lbox attribute can be useful in performing calculations, for example in accounting for the periodic boundary conditions of the simulation. There are also many attributes dedicated to rigorously keeping track of how a halo catalog was processed.

For example, during the initial processing of the halo catalog, cuts may have been placed on certain columns of the halo catalog. If you processed your halo catalog using the halotools.sim_manager.RockstarHlistReader, every cut you used to reduce the halo catalog will have a corresponding attribute reminding you of the choice you made during the data reduction. In the Halotools-provided snapshots, any (sub)halo that never had more than 300 particles at any point in its assembly history was discarded. The halo_mpeak column of the halo table stores the largest value of the virial mass ever attained by the halo throughout its assembly history, and so this 300-particle cut is reflected by the halo_mpeak_row_cut_min attribute of the halo catalog:

print("Minimum halo_mpeak = %.2e" % halocat.halo_mpeak_row_cut_min)
Minimum halo_mpeak = 4.05e+10

As simple bookkeeping errors are so common in simulation analysis, you may find Halotools useful to help avoid buggy results even if the CachedHaloCatalog is the only feature of the package that you use.