How is the local-scale gravitational instability influenced by the surrounding large-scale structure formation?

Abstract

We develop the formalism to investigate the relation between the evolution of the large-scale (quasi) linear structure and that of the small-scale nonlinear structure in Newtonian cosmology within the Lagrangian framework. In doing so, we first derive the standard Friedmann expansion law using the averaging procedure over the present horizon scale. Then the large-scale (quasi) linear flow is defined by averaging the full trajectory field over a large-scale domain, but much smaller than the horizon scale. The rest of the full trajectory field is supposed to describe small-scale nonlinear dynamics. We obtain the evolution equations for the large-scale and small-scale parts of the trajectory field. These are coupled to each other in most general situations. It is shown that if the shear deformation of fluid elements is ignored in the averaged large-scale dynamics, the small-scale dynamics is described by Newtonian dynamics in an effective Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) background with a local scale factor. The local scale factor is defined by the sum of the global scale factor and the expansion deformation of the averaged large-scale displacement field. This means that the evolution of small-scale fluctuations is influenced by the surrounding large-scale structure through the modification of FRW scale factor. The effect might play an important role in the structure formation scenario. Furthermore, it is argued that the so-called {\it optimized} or {\it truncated} Lagrangian perturbation theory is a good approximation in investigating the large-scale structure formation up to the quasi nonlinear regime, even when the small-scale fluctuations are in the non-linear regime.