A new method for accurate velocity statistics estimation

Abstract

We introduce two new methods to obtain reliable velocity field statistics from N-body simulations, or indeed from any general density and velocity fluctuation field sampled by discrete points. These methods, the {\it Voronoi tessellation method} and {\it Delaunay tessellation method}, are based on the use of the Voronoi and Delaunay tessellations of the point distribution defined by the locations at which the velocity field is sampled. In the Voronoi method the velocity is supposed to be uniform within the Voronoi polyhedra, whereas the Delaunay method constructs a velocity field by linear interpolation between the four velocities at the locations defining each Delaunay tetrahedron. The most important advantage of these methods is that they provide an optimal estimator for determining the statistics of volume-averaged quantities, as opposed to the available numerical methods that mainly concern mass-averaged quantities. As the major share of the related analytical work on velocity field statistics has focussed on volume-averaged quantities, the availability of appropriate numerical estimators is of crucial importance for checking the validity of the analytical perturbation calculations. In addition, it allows us to study the statistics of the velocity field in the highly nonlinear clustering regime. Although in most cases both the Voronoi and the Delaunay method lead to equally good velocity field estimates, the Delaunay method may be slightly preferable. In particular it performs considerably better at small radii. Note that it is more CPU-time intensive while its requirement for memory space is almost a factor 8 lower than the Voronoi method.