A new test for the stable clustering hypothesis

The stable clustering hypothesis is a fundamental assumption about the nonlinear clustering of matter in cosmology. It states that the mean physical separation of particles is a constant on sufficiently small scales. While many authors have attempted to test the hypothesis with cosmological N-body simulations, no consensus has been reached on whether and where the hypothesis is valid, because of the limited dynamical range this type of simulations can achieve. In this Letter, we propose to test the hypothesis with high resolution halo simulations, since the individual halo simulations can resolve much better the fine structures of the halos and since almost all pairs of particles with small separations are presumed to be inside virialized halos. We calculated the mean pair velocity for 14 high resolution halos of ∼ 1 million particles in a low-density flat cold dark matter model. The result agrees very well with the stable clustering prediction within the measurement uncertainty ∼ 30% over a large range of scales where the overdensity is 10 3 to 10 6. The accuracy of the test can be improved to ∼ 10% if some 100 halos with a similar resolution are analyzed.