Spinning masters: on the impact of tidal forces and protohalo size on early spin evolution

ABSTRACT In this work, we explore how the size and surrounding tidal fields of dark matter protohaloes at high redshift influence their angular momentum (AM) evolution. While tidal torque theory (TTT) states that AM arises from the misalignment between protohalo shape and tidal fields, it remains unclear what is the characteristic scale of the perturbations that couple with each protohalo, and its correlation with protohalo properties such as size. Moreover, although the assumptions of the TTT are assumed to hold during the linear and quasi-linear regime, cosmological simulations reveal that discrepancies between its predictions and the true AM of haloes emerge earlier than expected. To address this, we analyse cosmological simulations to study tidal fields at $z=80$ using different smoothing lengths, and determine which best predicts AM under TTT. We then investigate discrepancies between predicted and actual AM across redshifts, considering the effect of evolving tidal and inertia tensors. Our results show that the early tidal field couples with the inertia tensor of protohaloes on scales about half of their characteristic size and confirm that disagreements between theory and simulation emerge already at relatively early cosmic times ($z\sim 10\!-\!5$), suggesting a systematic effect from protohalo shape interacting with the forming cosmic web.