355 research outputs found
The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure I: Theory and implementation
We present DisPerSE, a novel approach to the coherent multi-scale
identification of all types of astrophysical structures, and in particular the
filaments, in the large scale distribution of matter in the Universe. This
method and corresponding piece of software allows a genuinely scale free and
parameter free identification of the voids, walls, filaments, clusters and
their configuration within the cosmic web, directly from the discrete
distribution of particles in N-body simulations or galaxies in sparse
observational catalogues. To achieve that goal, the method works directly over
the Delaunay tessellation of the discrete sample and uses the DTFE density
computed at each tracer particle; no further sampling, smoothing or processing
of the density field is required.
The idea is based on recent advances in distinct sub-domains of computational
topology, which allows a rigorous application of topological principles to
astrophysical data sets, taking into account uncertainties and Poisson noise.
Practically, the user can define a given persistence level in terms of
robustness with respect to noise (defined as a "number of sigmas") and the
algorithm returns the structures with the corresponding significance as sets of
critical points, lines, surfaces and volumes corresponding to the clusters,
filaments, walls and voids; filaments, connected at cluster nodes, crawling
along the edges of walls bounding the voids. The method is also interesting as
it allows for a robust quantification of the topological properties of a
discrete distribution in terms of Betti numbers or Euler characteristics,
without having to resort to smoothing or having to define a particular scale.
In this paper, we introduce the necessary mathematical background and
describe the method and implementation, while we address the application to 3D
simulated and observed data sets to the companion paper.Comment: A higher resolution version is available at
http://www.iap.fr/users/sousbie together with complementary material.
Submitted to MNRA
The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure II: Illustrations
The recently introduced discrete persistent structure extractor (DisPerSE,
Soubie 2010, paper I) is implemented on realistic 3D cosmological simulations
and observed redshift catalogues (SDSS); it is found that DisPerSE traces
equally well the observed filaments, walls, and voids in both cases. In either
setting, filaments are shown to connect onto halos, outskirt walls, which
circumvent voids. Indeed this algorithm operates directly on the particles
without assuming anything about the distribution, and yields a natural
(topologically motivated) self-consistent criterion for selecting the
significance level of the identified structures. It is shown that this
extraction is possible even for very sparsely sampled point processes, as a
function of the persistence ratio. Hence astrophysicists should be in a
position to trace and measure precisely the filaments, walls and voids from
such samples and assess the confidence of the post-processed sets as a function
of this threshold, which can be expressed relative to the expected amplitude of
shot noise. In a cosmic framework, this criterion is comparable to friend of
friend for the identifications of peaks, while it also identifies the connected
filaments and walls, and quantitatively recovers the full set of topological
invariants (Betti numbers) {\sl directly from the particles} as a function of
the persistence threshold. This criterion is found to be sufficient even if one
particle out of two is noise, when the persistence ratio is set to 3-sigma or
more. The algorithm is also implemented on the SDSS catalogue and used to locat
interesting configurations of the filamentary structure. In this context we
carried the identification of an ``optically faint'' cluster at the
intersection of filaments through the recent observation of its X-ray
counterpart by SUZAKU. The corresponding filament catalogue will be made
available online.Comment: A higher resolution version is available at
http://www.iap.fr/users/sousbie together with complementary material (movie
and data). Submitted to MNRA
Stein structures: existence and flexibility
This survey on the topology of Stein manifolds is an extract from our recent
joint book. It is compiled from two short lecture series given by the first
author in 2012 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Alfred
Renyi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figure
Combinatorial Gradient Fields for 2D Images with Empirically Convergent Separatrices
This paper proposes an efficient probabilistic method that computes
combinatorial gradient fields for two dimensional image data. In contrast to
existing algorithms, this approach yields a geometric Morse-Smale complex that
converges almost surely to its continuous counterpart when the image resolution
is increased. This approach is motivated using basic ideas from probability
theory and builds upon an algorithm from discrete Morse theory with a strong
mathematical foundation. While a formal proof is only hinted at, we do provide
a thorough numerical evaluation of our method and compare it to established
algorithms.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
Felix:A Topology Based Framework for Visual Exploration of Cosmic Filaments
The large-scale structure of the universe is comprised of virialized blob-like clusters, linear filaments, sheet-like walls and huge near empty three-dimensional voids. Characterizing the large scale universe is essential to our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies. The density range of clusters, walls and voids are relatively well separated, when compared to filaments, which span a relatively larger range. The large scale filamentary network thus forms an intricate part of the cosmic web. In this paper, we describe Felix, a topology based framework for visual exploration of filaments in the cosmic web. The filamentary structure is represented by the ascending manifold geometry of the 2-saddles in the Morse-Smale complex of the density field. We generate a hierarchy of Morse-Smale complexes and query for filaments based on the density ranges at the end points of the filaments. The query is processed efficiently over the entire hierarchical Morse-Smale complex, allowing for interactive visualization. We apply Felix to computer simulations based on the heuristic Voronoi kinematic model and the standard LCDM cosmology, and demonstrate its usefulness through two case studies. First, we extract cosmic filaments within and across cluster like regions in Voronoi kinematic simulation datasets. We demonstrate that we produce similar results to existing structure finders. Second, we extract different classes of filaments based on their density characteristics from the LCDM simulation datasets. Filaments that form the spine of the cosmic web, which exist in high density regions in the current epoch, are isolated using Felix. Also, filaments present in void-like regions are isolated and visualized. These filamentary structures are often over shadowed by higher density range filaments and are not easily characterizable and extractable using other filament extraction methodologies
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