The phases of the Fourier modes appearing in a plane-wave expansion of
cosmological density fields play a vital role in determining the morphology of
gravitationally-developed clustering. We demonstrate this qualitatively and
quantitatively using simulations. In particular, we use cross-correlation and
rank-correlation techniques to quantify the agreement between a simulated
distribution and phase-only reconstructions. The phase-only reconstructions
exhibit a high degree of correlation with the original distributions, showing
how meaningful spatial reconstruction of cosmological density fields depends
more on phase accuracy than on amplitudes.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures (with 2 added figures), accepted for publication
in MNRA