Dynamical and statistical aspects of gravitational clustering in the Universe

Abstract

We apply topological measures of clustering such as percolation and genus curves (PC & GC) and shape statistics to a set of scale free N-body simulations of large scale structure. Both genus and percolation curves evolve with time reflecting growth of non-Gaussianity in the N-body density field. The amplitude of the genus curve decreases with epoch due to non-linear mode coupling, the decrease being more noticeable for spectra with small scale power. Plotted against the filling factor GC shows very little evolution-a surprising result, since the percolation curve shows significant evolution for the same data. Our results indicate that both PC and GC could be used to discriminate between rival models of structure formation and the analysis of CMB maps. Using shape sensitive statistics we find that there is a strong tendency for objects in our simulations to be filament-like, the degree of filamentarity increasing with epoch.