Quantifying resolution in cosmological $N$-body simulations using self-similarity

We demonstrate that testing for self-similarity in scale-free simulations provides an excellent tool to quantify the resolution at small scales of cosmological N-body simulations. Analysing two-point correlation functions measured in simulations using ABACUS, we show how observed deviations from self-similarity reveal the range of time and distance scales in which convergence is obtained. While the well-converged scales show accuracy below 1 percent, our results show that, with a small force softening length, the spatial resolution is essentially determined by the mass resolution. At later times the lower cut-off scale on convergence evolves in comoving units as $a^{-1/2}$ ($a$ being the scale factor), consistent with a hypothesis that it is set by two-body collisionality. A corollary of our results is that N-body simulations, particularly at high red-shift, contain a significant spatial range in which clustering appears converged with respect to the time-stepping and force softening but has not actually converged to the physical continuum result. The method developed can be applied to determine the resolution of any clustering statistic and extended to infer resolution limits for non-scale-free simulations.