No Arabic abstract
We use N-body simulations to examine whether a characteristic turnaround radius, as predicted from the spherical collapse model in a $rm {Lambda CDM}$ Universe, can be meaningfully identified for galaxy clusters, in the presence of full three-dimensional effects. We use The Dark Sky Simulations and Illustris-TNG dark-matter--only cosmological runs to calculate radial velocity profiles around collapsed structures, extending out to many times the virial radius $R_{200}$. There, the turnaround radius can be unambiguously identified as the largest non-expanding scale around a center of gravity. We find that: (a) Indeed, a single turnaround scale can meaningfully describe strongly non-spherical structures. (b) For halos of masses $M_{200}>10^{13}M_odot$, the turnaround radius $R_{ta}$ scales with the enclosed mass $M_{ta}$ as $M_{ta}^{1/3}$, as predicted by the spherical collapse model. (c) The deviation of $R_{ta}$ in simulated halos from the spherical collapse model prediction is insensitive to halo asphericity. Rather, it is sensitive to the tidal forces due to massive neighbors when such are present. (d) Halos exhibit a characteristic average density within the turnaround scale. This characteristic density is dependent on cosmology and redshift. For the present cosmic epoch and for concordance cosmological parameters ($Omega_m sim 0.7$; $Omega_Lambda sim 0.3$) turnaround structures exhibit an average matter density contrast with the background Universe of $delta sim 11$. Thus $R_{ta}$ is equivalent to $R_{11}$ -- in a way analogous to defining the virial radius as $R_{200}$ -- with the advantage that $R_{11}$ is shown in this work to correspond to a kinematically relevant scale in N-body simulations.
In the next decade, cosmological surveys will have the statistical power to detect the absolute neutrino mass scale. N-body simulations of large-scale structure formation play a central role in interpreting data from such surveys. Yet these simulations are Newtonian in nature. We provide a quantitative study of the limitations to treating neutrinos, implemented as N-body particles, in N-body codes, focusing on the error introduced by neglecting special relativistic effects. Special relativistic effects are potentially important due to the large thermal velocities of neutrino particles in the simulation box. We derive a self-consistent theory of linear perturbations in Newtonian and non-relativistic neutrinos and use this to demonstrate that N-body simulations overestimate the neutrino free-streaming scale, and cause errors in the matter power spectrum that depend on the initial redshift of the simulations. For $z_{i} lesssim 100$, and neutrino masses within the currently allowed range, this error is $lesssim 0.5%$, though represents an up to $sim 10%$ correction to the shape of the neutrino-induced suppression to the cold dark matter power spectrum. We argue that the simulations accurately model non-linear clustering of neutrinos so that the error is confined to linear scales.
Two aspects of our recent N-body studies of star clusters are presented: (1) What impact does mass segregation and selective mass loss have on integrated photometry? (2) How well compare results from N-body simulations using NBODY4 and STARLAB/KIRA?
Large redshift surveys of galaxies and clusters are providing the first opportunities to search for distortions in the observed pattern of large-scale structure due to such effects as gravitational redshift. We focus on non-linear scales and apply a quasi-Newtonian approach using N-body simulations to predict the small asymmetries in the cross-correlation function of two galaxy different populations. Following recent work by Bonvin et al., Zhao and Peacock and Kaiser on galaxy clusters, we include effects which enter at the same order as gravitational redshift: the transverse Doppler effect, light-cone effects, relativistic beaming, luminosity distance perturbation and wide-angle effects. We find that all these effects cause asymmetries in the cross-correlation functions. Quantifying these asymmetries, we find that the total effect is dominated by the gravitational redshift and luminosity distance perturbation at small and large scales, respectively. By adding additional subresolution modelling of galaxy structure to the large-scale structure information, we find that the signal is significantly increased, indicating that structure on the smallest scales is important and should be included. We report on comparison of our simulation results with measurements from the SDSS/BOSS galaxy redshift survey in a companion paper.
We review recent progress in the description of the formation and evolution of galaxy clusters in a cosmological context by using numerical simulations. We focus our presentation on the comparison between simulated and observed X-ray properties, while we will also discuss numerical predictions on properties of the galaxy population in clusters. Many of the salient observed properties of clusters, such as X-ray scaling relations, radial profiles of entropy and density of the intracluster gas, and radial distribution of galaxies are reproduced quite well. In particular, the outer regions of cluster at radii beyond about 10 per cent of the virial radius are quite regular and exhibit scaling with mass remarkably close to that expected in the simplest case in which only the action of gravity determines the evolution of the intra-cluster gas. However, simulations generally fail at reproducing the observed cool-core structure of clusters: simulated clusters generally exhibit a significant excess of gas cooling in their central regions, which causes an overestimate of the star formation and incorrect temperature and entropy profiles. The total baryon fraction in clusters is below the mean universal value, by an amount which depends on the cluster-centric distance and the physics included in the simulations, with interesting tensions between observed stellar and gas fractions in clusters and predictions of simulations. Besides their important implications for the cosmological application of clusters, these puzzles also point towards the important role played by additional physical processes, beyond those already included in the simulations. We review the role played by these processes, along with the difficulty for their implementation, and discuss the outlook for the future progress in numerical modeling of clusters.
The interpretation of redshift surveys requires modeling the relationship between large-scale fluctuations in the observed number density of tracers, $delta_mathrm{h}$, and the underlying matter density, $delta$. Bias models often express $delta_mathrm{h}$ as a truncated series of integro-differential operators acting on $delta$, each weighted by a bias parameter. Due to the presence of `composite operators (obtained by multiplying fields evaluated at the same spatial location), the linear bias parameter measured from clustering statistics does not coincide with that appearing in the bias expansion. This issue can be cured by re-writing the expansion in terms of `renormalised operators. After providing a pedagogical and comprehensive review of bias renormalisation in perturbation theory, we generalize the concept to non-perturbative dynamics and successfully apply it to dark-matter haloes extracted from a large suite of N-body simulations. When comparing numerical and perturbative results, we highlight the effect of the window function employed to smooth the random fields. We then measure the bias parameters as a function of halo mass by fitting a non-perturbative bias model (both before and after applying renormalisation) to the cross spectrum $P_{delta_mathrm{h}delta}(k)$. Finally, we employ Bayesian model selection to determine the optimal operator set to describe $P_{delta_mathrm{h}delta}(k)$ for $k<0.2,h$ Mpc$^{-1}$ at redshift $z=0$. We find that it includes $delta, abla^2delta, delta^2$ and the square of the traceless tidal tensor, $s^2$. Considering higher-order terms (in $delta$) leads to overfitting as they cannot be precisely constrained by our data. We also notice that next-to-leading-order perturbative solutions are inaccurate for $kgtrsim 0.1,h$ Mpc$^{-1}$.