Cusps in cold dark matter haloes

We resolve the inner region of a massive cluster forming in a cosmological ΛCDM simulation with a mass resolution of 2 × 10 6 M ⊙ and before z=4.4 even 3 × 10 5 M ⊙ . This is a billion times less than the clusters final virial mass and a substantial increase over current ΛCDM simulations. We achieve this resolution using a new multi-mass refinement procedure and are now able to probe a dark matter halo density profile down to 0.1 percent of the virial radius. The inner density profile of this cluster halo is well fitted by a power-law ρ ∝ r − γ down to the smallest resolved scale. An inner region with roughly constant logarithmic slope is now resolved, which suggests that cuspy profiles describe the inner profile better than recently proposed profiles with a core. The cluster studied here is one out of a sample of six high resolution cluster simulations of Diemand et al. (2004b) and its inner slope of about γ = 1 . 2 lies close to the sample average.