Buried but not destroyed: the evolution from prompt cusps to NFW haloes

Abstract The internal structure of dark matter haloes encodes their assembly history and offers critical insight into the nature of dark matter and structure formation. Analytical studies and high-resolution simulations have recently predicted the formation of ‘prompt cusps’ - steep power-law density profiles that emerge rapidly from the monolithic collapse of primordial peaks. Yet, by z = 0 most haloes are well described by Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) density profiles, raising the question of how these early cusps are transformed in a cosmological setting. We address this problem using 64 zoom-in N-body simulations of eight haloes, each resimulated with eight different free-streaming wavenumbers to control the abundance of small-scale structure while keeping the large-scale environment fixed. To mitigate numerical discreteness effects, we classify artificial fragments and genuine subhaloes with a physically motivated procedure based on matching subhaloes to their progenitor peaks. At the population level, we demonstrate that haloes initially form prompt cusps, and their profiles subsequently transition towards the NFW form. Our study reveals three distinct pathways by which prompt cusps evolve: major mergers, accretion of artificial fragments, and interactions with large-scale filaments, each having a distinct impact on the inner density profile. In particular, we show that the original power-law cusp remains visible in the profile of particles associated with the primordial peak even when the total halo profile is already NFW-like. This work highlights the imprint of early collapse on present-day halo structure and provides new insights into the origin of the universality of the NFW profile.