SubHaloes going Notts: The SubHalo-Finder Comparison Project
  We present a detailed comparison of the substructure properties of a single
Milky Way sized dark matter halo from the Aquarius suite at five different
resolutions, as identified by a variety of different (sub-)halo finders for
simulations of cosmic structure formation. These finders span a wide range of
techniques and methodologies to extract and quantify substructures within a
larger non-homogeneous background density (e.g. a host halo). This includes
real-space, phase-space, velocity-space and time- space based finders, as well
as finders employing a Voronoi tessellation, friends-of-friends techniques, or
refined meshes as the starting point for locating substructure.A common
post-processing pipeline was used to uniformly analyse the particle lists
provided by each finder. We extract quantitative and comparable measures for
the subhaloes, primarily focusing on mass and the peak of the rotation curve
for this particular study. We find that all of the finders agree extremely well
on the presence and location of substructure and even for properties relating
to the inner part part of the subhalo (e.g. the maximum value of the rotation
curve). For properties that rely on particles near the outer edge of the
subhalo the agreement is at around the 20 per cent level. We find that basic
properties (mass, maximum circular velocity) of a subhalo can be reliably
recovered if the subhalo contains more than 100 particles although its presence
can be reliably inferred for a lower particle number limit of 20. We finally
note that the logarithmic slope of the subhalo cumulative number count is
remarkably consistent and <1 for all the finders that reached high resolution.
If correct, this would indicate that the larger and more massive, respectively,
substructures are the most dynamically interesting and that higher levels of
the (sub-)subhalo hierarchy become progressively less important.
