Speaker
Description
Understanding how galaxies connect to their host dark matter halos is key to uncovering the physics of galaxy formation and the growth of cosmic structure. In this talk, I present two recent studies that use weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering to explore this connection from complementary perspectives. In the first part, we go beyond the traditional stellar–halo mass relation and investigate galaxy morphology—quantified by the Sérsic index—as a secondary tracer of halo properties. We find that more concentrated galaxies tend to reside in more massive and more concentrated halos, suggesting that galaxy structure retains memory of the coevolution between galaxies and their halos. In the second part, we examine luminosity-dependent assembly bias for central galaxies, finding a clear detection at the 3σ level: brighter centrals typically inhabit more concentrated halos that formed earlier but are less strongly clustered. Together, these results shed new light on how galaxy properties reflect the formation history of their dark matter halos.
