The dark outside: the density profile of dark matter haloes beyond the virial radius

Hugo Tavio, Antonio J. Cuesta, Francisco Prada, Anatoly A. Klypin, Miguel A. Sanchez-Conde

Published 2008-07-18Version 1

We present an approximation for the average density profile of dark matter haloes in the LambdaCDM cosmological model, which is accurate to within 10--15% even for large radial distances from 0.05R_{vir} up to 10R_{vir} for halo masses ranging from 10^{11.5} to 10^{15.0} h^{-1}M_{Sun}. We propose a modified form of the Navarro, Frenk & White (NFW) approximation: \rho(r)=\rho_{NFW}(r)+ A (r/R_{vir})^{-1}+B (1+r/R_{vir})^{-1}. This generalized expression, which is applicable to the external regions of dark matter haloes, only very slightly affects the density in the inner regions of haloes. The strong correlation among the different parameters in the model allows us to describe the profile in terms of just one parameter: the virial mass. We integrate our density profile to derive the enclosed mass in a sphere of a given radius and compare it with the NFW results. We find that the NFW underestimates the enclosed mass by more than 50% at 10R_{vir}, whereas our model reproduces the results from numerical simulations to within 2% accuracy even at this distance. We also use this new approximation to study the weak gravitational lensing and to obtain an analytic expression for the tangential shear. This allows us to quantify the contribution to the shear from the outer regions of the density profile. For the first time we calculate the difference between the tangential shear calculated via the NFW profile and the corresponding result when the external regions of haloes in cosmological simulations are taken into account. We find a 4% difference for all the mass ranges under study.