Transients from Initial Conditions in Cosmological Simulations

We study the impact of setting initial conditions in numerical simulations using the standard procedure based on the Zel'dovich approximation (ZA). As it is well known from perturbation theory, ZA initial conditions have incorrect second and higher-order growth and therefore excite long-lived transients in the evolution of the statistical properties of density and velocity fields. We also study the improvement brought by using more accurate initial conditions based on second-order Lagrangian perturbation theory (2LPT). We show that 2LPT initial conditions reduce transients significantly and thus are much more appropriate for numerical simulations devoted to precision cosmology. Using controlled numerical experiments with ZA and 2LPT initial conditions we show that simulations started at redshift z_i=49 using the ZA underestimate the power spectrum in the nonlinear regime by about 2,4,8 % at z=0,1,3 respectively, whereas the mass function of dark matter halos is underestimated by 5% at m=10^15 M_sun/h (z=0) and 10% at m=2x10^14M_sun/h (z=1). The clustering of halos is also affected to the few percent level at z=0. These systematics effects are typically larger than statistical uncertainties in recent mass function and power spectrum fitting formulae extracted from numerical simulations. At large scales, the measured transients in higher-order correlations can be understood from first principle calculations based on perturbation theory.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, code to generate 2LPT initial conditions available at http://cosmo.nyu.edu/roman/2LPT . Typos corrected, Fig.13 symbols consistent with Fig.11,1

Cosmology and the Bispectrum

The present spatial distribution of galaxies in the Universe is non-Gaussian, with 40% skewness in 50 Mpc/h spheres, and remarkably little is known about the information encoded in it about cosmological parameters beyond the power spectrum. In this work we present an attempt to bridge this gap by studying the bispectrum, paying particular attention to a joint analysis with the power spectrum and their combination with CMB data. We address the covariance properties of the power spectrum and bispectrum including the effects of beat coupling that lead to interesting cross-correlations, and discuss how baryon acoustic oscillations break degeneracies. We show that the bispectrum has significant information on cosmological parameters well beyond its power in constraining galaxy bias, and when combined with the power spectrum is more complementary than combining power spectra of different samples of galaxies, since non-Gaussianity provides a somewhat different direction in parameter space. In the framework of flat cosmological models we show that most of the improvement of adding bispectrum information corresponds to parameters related to the amplitude and effective spectral index of perturbations, which can be improved by almost a factor of two. Moreover, we demonstrate that the expected statistical uncertainties in sigma8 of a few percent are robust to relaxing the dark energy beyond a cosmological constant

Un modelo simple de propagación de incendios forestales con ecuaciones diferenciales ordinarias

Artículo fotocopiado. No existe versión digital. Licencia Creative Commons. Atribución 3.0 España (CC BY 3.0 ES)Pueblas, S.; García Raffi, LM.; Sánchez Pérez, EA.; Sánchez Pérez, JV. (2001). Un modelo simple de propagación de incendios forestales con ecuaciones diferenciales ordinarias. Epsilon. 51:489-502. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/60373S4895025

The Schro¨\ddot{o}dinger-Poisson equations as the large-N limit of the Newtonian N-body system: applications to the large scale dark matter dynamics

In this paper it is argued how the dynamics of the classical Newtonian N-body system can be described in terms of the Schr$\ddot{o}$dinger-Poisson equations in the large $N$ limit. This result is based on the stochastic quantization introduced by Nelson, and on the Calogero conjecture. According to the Calogero conjecture, the emerging effective Planck constant is computed in terms of the parameters of the N-body system as $\hbar \sim M^{5/3} G^{1/2} (N/)^{1/6}$, where is $G$ the gravitational constant, $N$ and $M$ are the number and the mass of the bodies, and $$ is their average density. The relevance of this result in the context of large scale structure formation is discussed. In particular, this finding gives a further argument in support of the validity of the Schr$\ddot{o}$dinger method as numerical double of the N-body simulations of dark matter dynamics at large cosmological scales.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Euro. Phys. J.

The Signature of Large Scale Structures on the Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Sky

If the diffuse extragalactic gamma ray emission traces the large scale structures of the universe, peculiar anisotropy patterns are expected in the gamma ray sky. In particular, because of the cutoff distance introduced by the absorption of 0.1-10 TeV photons on the infrared/optical background, prominent correlations with the local structures within a range of few hundreds Mpc should be present. We provide detailed predictions of the signal based on the PSCz map of the local universe. We also use mock N-body catalogues complemented with the halo model of structures to study some statistical features of the expected signatures. The results are largely independent from cosmological details, and depend mostly on the index of correlation (or bias) of the sources with respect to the large scale distribution of galaxies. For instance, the predicted signal in the case of a quadratic correlation (as it may happen for a dark matter annihilation contribution to the diffuse gamma flux) differs substantially from a linear correlation case, providing a complementary tool to unveil the nature of the sources of the diffuse gamma ray emission. The chances of the present and future space and ground based observatories to measure these features are discussed.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures; matches published versio