3 research outputs found
The multi-stream flows and the dynamics of the cosmic web
A new numerical technique to identify the cosmic web is proposed. It is based
on locating multi-stream flows, i.e. the places where the velocity field is
multi-valued. The method is local in Eulerian space, simple and computaionally
efficient. This technique uses the velocities of particles and thus takes into
account the dynamical information. This is in contrast with the majority of
standard methods that use the coordinates of particles only. Two quantities are
computed in every mesh cell: the mean and variance of the velocity field. In
the cells where the velocity is single-valued the variance must be equal to
zero exactly, therefore the cells with non-zero variance are identified as
multi-stream flows. The technique has been tested in a N-body simulation of the
\L CDM model. The preliminary analysis has shown that numerical noise does not
pose a significant problem. The web identified by the new method has been
compared with the web identified by the standard technique using only the
particle coordinates. The comparison has shown overall similarity of two webs
as expected, however they by no means are identical. For example, the
isocontours of the corresponding fields have significantly different shapes and
some density peaks of similar heights exhibit significant differences in the
velocity variance and vice versa. This suggest that the density and velocity
variance have a significant degree of independence. The shape of the
two-dimensional pdf of density and velocity variance confirms this proposition.
Thus, we conclude that the dynamical information probed by this technique
introduces an additional dimension into analysis of the web.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure