Controlled experiments in cosmological gravitational clustering

Abstract

A systematic study is conducted of gravitational instability in 3D on the basis of power-law initial spectra with and without spectral cutoff, emphasizing nonlinear effects and measures of nonlinearity; effects due to short and long waves in the initial conditions are separated. The existence of second-general pancakes is confirmed, and it is noted that while these are inhomogeneous, they generate a visually strong signal of filamentarity. An explicit comparison of smoothed initial conditions with smoothed envelope models also reconfirms the need to smooth over a scale larger than any nonlinearity, in order to extrapolate directly by linear theory from Gaussian initial conditions.