The Contribution of Mergers and Accretion to Dark Matter Halo Assembly: An Excursion Set Theory Approach

We study the relative contributions of mergers and accretion to the assembly of dark matter haloes within the framework of Excursion Set Theory (EST). We extend a variance-discretized merger-tree algorithm, which recursively reconstructs all branches of a complete merger tree and introduces a merger-ratio criterion for distinguishing mergers from accretion. The method is validated by comparing the resulting progenitor distributions with the analytical conditional first up-crossing distribution, showing excellent agreement over a wide range of halo masses and redshifts. We find that the accretion contribution depends strongly on the adopted merger-ratio threshold. For large merger ratios ($MR=0.1$–$0.25$), accretion accounts for up to $\sim 70\mathrm{\%}$ of the mass growth of massive haloes, whereas including all resolved mergers ($MR={10}^{-6}$) reduces the accretion contribution to $\sim 40\mathrm{\%}$. These values are in good agreement with previous N-body simulation results. The accreted mass exhibits a nearly self-similar distribution in the mass-redshift plane, with the dominant contribution arising from progenitors in the range ${10}^{-3}{M}_0\lesssim M\lesssim {10}^{-1}{M}_0$ and predominantly at $0.5\lesssim z\lesssim 2$. Our results demonstrate that EST-based merger trees provide an accurate and computationally efficient framework for investigating halo assembly and quantifying the relative roles of mergers and accretion in hierarchical structure formation.