Galaxies going MAD: The Galaxy-Finder Comparison Project
  With the ever increasing size and complexity of fully self-consistent
simulations of galaxy formation within the framework of the cosmic web, the
demands upon object finders for these simulations has simultaneously grown. To
this extent we initiated the Halo Finder Comparison Project that gathered
together all the experts in the field and has so far led to two comparison
papers, one for dark matter field haloes (Knebe et al. 2011), and one for dark
matter subhaloes (Onions et al. 2012). However, as state-of-the-art simulation
codes are perfectly capable of not only following the formation and evolution
of dark matter but also account for baryonic physics (e.g. hydrodynamics, star
formation, feedback) object finders should also be capable of taking these
additional processes into consideration. Here we report on a comparison of
codes as applied to the Constrained Local UniversE Simulation (CLUES) of the
formation of the Local Group which incorporates much of the physics relevant
for galaxy formation. We compare both the properties of the three main galaxies
in the simulation (representing the MW, M31, and M33) as well as their
satellite populations for a variety of halo finders ranging from phase-space to
velocity-space to spherical overdensity based codes, including also a mere
baryonic object finder. We obtain agreement amongst codes comparable to (if not
better than) our previous comparisons, at least for the total, dark, and
stellar components of the objects. However, the diffuse gas content of the
haloes shows great disparity, especially for low-mass satellite galaxies. This
is primarily due to differences in the treatment of the thermal energy during
the unbinding procedure. We acknowledge that the handling of gas in halo
finders is something that needs to be dealt with carefully, and the precise
treatment may depend sensitively upon the scientific problem being studied.
