Streams Going Notts: The tidal debris finder comparison project
  While various codes exist to systematically and robustly find haloes and
subhaloes in cosmological simulations (Knebe et al., 2011, Onions et al.,
2012), this is the first work to introduce and rigorously test codes that find
tidal debris (streams and other unbound substructure) in fully cosmological
simulations of structure formation. We use one tracking and three non-tracking
codes to identify substructure (bound and unbound) in a Milky Way type
simulation from the Aquarius suite (Springel et al., 2008) and post-process
their output with a common pipeline to determine the properties of these
substructures in a uniform way. By using output from a fully cosmological
simulation, we also take a step beyond previous studies of tidal debris that
have used simple toy models. We find that both tracking and non-tracking codes
agree well on the identification of subhaloes and more importantly, the {\em
unbound tidal features} associated with them. The distributions of basic
properties of the total substructure distribution (mass, velocity dispersion,
position) are recovered with a scatter of $\sim20%$. Using the tracking code as
our reference, we show that the non-tracking codes identify complex tidal
debris with purities of $\sim40%$. Analysing the results of the substructure
finders, we find that the general distribution of {\em substructures} differ
significantly from the distribution of bound {\em subhaloes}. Most importantly,
both bound and unbound {\em substructures} together constitute $\sim18%$ of the
host halo mass, which is a factor of $\sim2$ higher than the fraction in
self-bound {\em subhaloes}. However, this result is restricted by the remaining
challenge to cleanly define when an unbound structure has become part of the
host halo. Nevertheless, the more general substructure distribution provides a
more complete picture of a halo's accretion history.
