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Welcome to the documentation for HBT-HERONS! HBT-HERONS is a history-based algorithm used to find subhaloes in cosmological dark-matter-only and hydrodynamical simulations. It is a new version of the HBT+ subhalo finder, with additions made to improve the tracking of subhaloes in dark-matter-only and hydrodynamical simulations. The main changes and methodology of HBT-HERONS are described in Forouhar Moreno et al. 2025.

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About

History-based subhalo finding makes use of the fact that structure in the Universe forms hierarchically. In other words, any subhalo must have first formed in relative isolation. In practice, this means that particles associated to a field subhalo are tagged, and the memberships are propagated forward in time. Those memberships are used if the subhalo in question has become a satellite, by grouping all particles that share a common subhalo origin.

This relatively simple, yet powerful approach presents several advantages relative to traditional subhalo finding methods.

• The properties (and existence) of subhaloes are more robustly recovered in dense enviroments, as the algorithm does not rely on the often complicated instantaneous particle distribution.
• Merger trees are self-consistently built using the past evolution of subhaloes.