On the Nonlinear Evolution of Cosmic Web: Lagrangian Dynamics Revisited

Abstract

We investigate the nonlinear evolution of cosmic morphologies of the large-scale structure by examining the Lagrangian dynamics of various tensors of a cosmic fluid element, including the velocity gradient tensor, the Hessian matrix of the gravitational potential as well as the deformation tensor. Instead of the eigenvalue representation, the first two tensors, which associate with the "kinematic" and "dynamical" cosmic web classification algorithm respectively, are studied in a more convenient parameter space. These parameters are defined as the rotational invariant coefficients of the characteristic equation of the tensor. In the nonlinear local model (NLM) where the magnetic part of Weyl tensor vanishes, these invariants are fully capable of characterizing the dynamics. Unlike the Zeldovich approximation (ZA), where various morphologies do not change before approaching a one-dimensional singularity, the sheets in NLM are unstable for both overdense and underdense perturbations. While it has long been known that the coupling between tidal tensor and velocity shear would cause a filamentary final configuration of a collapsing region, we show that the underdense perturbation are more subtle, as the balance between the shear rate (tidal force) and the divergence (density) could lead to different morphologies. Interestingly, this instability also sets the basis for understanding some distinctions of the cosmic web identified dynamically and kinematically. We show that the sheets with negative density perturbation in the potential based algorithm would turn to filaments faster than in the kinematic method, which could explain the distorted dynamical filamentary structure observed in the simulation.