arXiv subjects

Cristian Barrera-Hinojosa

Publications and source records attributed to Cristian Barrera-Hinojosa.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The frame-dragging vector potential on galaxy scales from Dark-Matter-only Newtonian $N$-body simulations

Effects of General Relativity are usually neglected in the non-linear evolution of structures, where Newtonian $N$-body simulations are traditionally employed. In the post-Friedmann expansion framework, a weak-field relativistic approximation purpose-built for cosmology, a frame-dragging gravito-magnetic vector potential arises at leading order, sourced by momentum currents. At this order, the vector potential contributes to the metric while leaving the dynamics of the matter fields unaffected, as it does not appear in the Euler equation. It can therefore be extracted a posteriori from standard N-body simulations, where the dynamics is purely Newtonian. Using the Delaunay Tessellation Field Estimator code on the IllustrisTNG simulations, here we extend previous work in order to compute the power spectrum of this vector potential down to galactic scales. The magnitude of the vector potential is two orders of magnitude larger than predicted by perturbation theory, and is a $1\% \sim 0.1\%$ effect compared to the non-linear Newtonian scalar gravitational potential. In the redshift range considered here, the gravito-magnetic effect remains subdominant, without showing any enhancement during a particular phase in the evolution of structures, aside from the continuous growth of non-linearity at low redshift. Although this seems to suggest that, within the $Λ$CDM model, no significant gravito-magnetic effects contribute to the non-linear evolution of cosmic structures, i.e. to the dynamics of massive particles, possible observational consequences, e.g. in lensing, deserve further exploration.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2026

Signatures of Extended Dark Energy Parametrisations in Structure Formation under Background Constraints

We study structure formation in alternative cosmological models constrained by background observations, including $Λ$CDM, wCDM, the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder parametrisation and a flexible Chebyshev expansion of the dark energy equation of state. The models are constrained using baryon acoustic oscillations, cosmic microwave background, cosmic chronometers and strong lensing measurements. Using the best-fitting parameters, we generate cosmology-dependent initial conditions and perform N-body simulations to analyse the matter power spectrum, halo mass function and halo density profiles. Although all models remain broadly consistent with $Λ$CDM at the background level, differences in the physical matter density $Ω_{0m}h^2$ and in the expansion history $H(z)$ lead to distinct growth histories that are amplified by non-linear evolution. We find a clear hierarchy in the power spectrum amplitude and in $σ_8$, with the Chebyshev and CPL models exhibiting enhanced small-scale power, earlier halo formation at $z\gtrsim2$ and a migration of excess toward higher masses at late times. The wCDM model displays milder and partially compensating effects driven by its different expansion history. When expressed in terms of the scaled radius $r/R_{200c}$, halo density profiles show a high degree of universality across cosmologies, indicating that internal halo structure is largely governed by the same gravitational dynamics. These results demonstrate that even modest background-level variations in $w(z)$ can translate into coherent non-linear signatures, highlighting the constraining power of large-scale structure observables in extended dark energy models.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

ExaGRyPE: Numerical General Relativity Solvers Based upon the Hyperbolic PDEs Solver Engine ExaHyPE

ExaGRyPE describes a suite of solvers for numerical relativity, based upon ExaHyPE 2, the second generation of our Exascale Hyperbolic PDE Engine. The presented generation of ExaGRyPE solves the Einstein equations in the CCZ4 formulation under a 3+1 foliation and focuses on black hole spacetimes. It employs a block-structured Cartesian grid carrying a higher-order order Finite Difference scheme with adaptive mesh refinement, it facilitates massive parallelism combining message passing, domain decomposition and task parallelism, and it supports the injection of particles into the grid as data probes or tracers. We introduce the ExaGRyPE-specific building blocks within ExaHyPE 2, and discuss its software architecture and compute-n-feel: For this, we formalize the creation of any specific simulation with ExaGRyPE as a sequence of lowering operations, where abstract logical tasks are successively broken into finer tasks until we obtain an abstraction level that can be mapped onto a C++ executable. The overall program logic is fully specified via a domain-specific Python interface, we map this logic onto a more detailed set of numerical tasks, subsequently lower this representation onto technical tasks that the underlying ExaHyPE engine uses to parallelize the application, before eventually the technical tasks are mapped onto task graphs including the actual PDE term evaluations, initial conditions, boundary conditions, and so forth. We end up with a rigorous separation of concerns which shields ExaGRyPE users from technical details and hence simplifies the development of novel physical models. We present the simulations and data for the gauge wave, static single black holes and rotating binary black hole systems, demonstrating that the code base is mature and usable. However, we also uncover domain-specific numerical challenges that need further study by the community in future work.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2024

Minkowski Functionals of Large-Scale Structure as a Probe of Modified Gravity

In this study, we explore the potential of utilizing the four Minkowski functionals, which can fully describe the morphological properties of the large-scale structures, as a robust tool for investigating the modified gravity, particularly on non-linear and quasi-linear scales. With the assistance of the N-body simulation, we employ the Minkowski functionals to probe the Hu-Sawicki f(R) gravity model. The focus is on understanding the morphorlogical properties extracted by the Minkowski functionals and their sensitivity to modified gravity. Our analysis involves a comprehensive examination of the cosmic variance arising from finite simulation volumes. By systematically varying smoothing scales and redshifts, we quantify the information encoded in the Minkowski functionals measured from the dark-matter density field. The goal is to assess the capacity of the Minkowksi functionals to constrain the model and explore potential improvements through their combination. Additionally, we investigate the impact of using biased tracers such as dark matter halos and the halo occupation distribution galaxies on the modified gravity signatures within the Minkowksi functionals of the LSS. Furthermore, we evaluate the influence of the redshift space distortion on the observed results. In summary, our study suggests that the Minkowski functionals of the large-scale structures hold promise as a stringent tool for constraining modified gravity and offer valuable insights into the morphological features of the cosmic web.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Looking for a twist: probing the cosmological gravitomagnetic effect via weak lensing-kSZ cross correlations

General relativity predicts that the rotational momentum flux of matter twists the spacetime via a vector gravitomagnetic (frame-dragging) field, which remains undetected in cosmology. This vector field induces an additional gravitational lensing effect; at the same time, the momentum field sources the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. The common origin of these two effects allows us to probe the gravitomagnetic signal via their cross-correlations. In this paper, we explore the possibility of detecting the gravitomagnetic field in $Λ$CDM by cross-correlating the weak-lensing convergence field with the CMB temperature map, which is imprinted with the kSZ signal. This approach allows us to extract the gravitomagnetic effect because the cross correlation between the standard Newtonian contribution to the weak-lensing convergence field, $κ_Φ$, and the kSZ effect is expected to vanish. We study the cross correlations with a suite of large-volume Newtonian $N$-body simulations and a small-volume, high-resolution, general-relativistic counterpart. We show that insufficient simulation resolution can introduce significant spurious correlations between $κ_Φ$ and kSZ. From the high-resolution simulation, we find that the cumulative signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the kSZ-gravitomagnetic convergence field can reach almost 15 (30) at $\ell\simeq5000$ ($10^4$) for the lensing source redshift $z_s=0.83$, if only cosmic variance is considered. We make forecast for next-generation lensing surveys such as Euclid and LSST, and CMB experiments such as Simons Observatory and CMB-S4, and find that, for $z_s=1.4$, the cumulative SNR can exceed 5 (9) at $\ell\simeq5000$ ($10^4$), indicating that the cosmological gravitomagnetic effect can be detected, if several foreground contaminations can be removed.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Vector modes in $Λ$CDM: the gravitomagnetic potential in dark matter haloes from relativistic $N$-body simulations

We investigate the transverse modes of the gravitational and velocity fields in $Λ$CDM, based on a high-resolution simulation performed using the adaptive-mesh refinement general-relativistic $N$-body code GRAMSES. We study the generation of vorticity in the dark matter velocity field at low redshift, providing fits to the shape and evolution of its power spectrum over a range of scales. By analysing the gravitomagnetic vector potential, which is absent in Newtonian simulations, in dark matter haloes with masses ranging from $\sim10^{12.5}~h^{-1}{M}_{\odot}$ to $\sim10^{15}~h^{-1}{M}_{\odot}$, we find that its magnitude correlates with the halo mass, peaking in the inner regions. Nevertheless, on average, its ratio against the scalar gravitational potential remains fairly constant, below percent level, decreasing roughly linearly with redshift and showing a weak dependence on halo mass. Furthermore, we show that the gravitomagnetic acceleration in haloes peaks towards the core and reaches almost $10^{-10}$ $h$ cm/s$^2$ in the most massive halo of the simulation. However, regardless of the halo mass, the ratio between the magnitudes of the gravitomagnetic force and the standard gravitational force is typically at around the $10^{-5}$ level inside the haloes, again without significant radius dependence. This result confirms that the gravitomagnetic effects have a negligible impact on structure formation, even for the most massive structures, although its behaviour in low density regions remains to be explored. Likewise, the impact on observations remains to be understood in the future.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Numerical solutions to Einstein's equations in a shearing-dust Universe: a code comparison

A number of codes for general-relativistic simulations of cosmological structure formation have been developed in recent years. Here we demonstrate that a sample of these codes produce consistent results beyond the Newtonian regime. We simulate solutions to Einstein's equations dominated by gravitomagnetism -- a vector-type gravitational field that doesn't exist in Newtonian gravity and produces frame-dragging, the leading-order post-Newtonian effect. We calculate the coordinate-invariant effect on intersecting null geodesics by performing ray tracing in each independent code. With this observable quantity, we assess and compare each code's ability to compute relativistic effects.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

GRAMSES: a new route to general relativistic $N$-body simulations in cosmology. Part II. Initial conditions

We address the generation of initial conditions (ICs) for GRAMSES, a code for nonlinear general relativistic (GR) $N$-body cosmological simulations recently introduced in Ref. [1]. GRAMSES adopts a constant mean curvature slicing with a minimal distortion gauge, where the linear growth rate is scale-dependent, and the standard method for realising initial particle data is not straightforwardly applicable. A new method is introduced, in which the initial positions of particles are generated from the displacement field realised for a matter power spectrum as usual, but the velocity is calculated by finite-differencing the displacement fields around the initial redshift. In this way, all the information required for setting up the initial conditions is drawn from three consecutive input matter power spectra, and additional assumptions such as scale-independence of the linear growth factor and growth rate are not needed. We implement this method in a modified 2LPTic code, and demonstrate that in a Newtonian setting it can reproduce the velocity field given by the default 2LPTic code with subpercent accuracy. We also show that the matter and velocity power spectra of the initial particle data generated for GRAMSES simulations using this method agree very well with the linear-theory predictions in the particular gauge used by GRAMSES. Finally, we discuss corrections to the finite difference calculation of the velocity when radiation is present, as well as additional corrections implemented in GRAMSES to ensure consistency. This method can be applied in ICs generation for GR simulations in generic gauges, and simulations of cosmological models with scale-dependent linear growth rate.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Relativistic effects in the large-scale structure with effective dark energy fluids

We study the imprints of an effective dark energy fluid in the large scale structure of the universe through the observed angular power spectrum of galaxies in the relativistic regime. We adopt the phenomenological approach that introduces two parameters $\{Q,η\}$ at the level of linear perturbations and allow to take into account the modified clustering (or effective gravitational constant) and anisotropic stress appearing in models beyond $Λ$CDM. We characterize the effective dark energy fluid by an equation of state parameter $w=-0.95$ and various sound speed cases in the range $10^{-6}\leq c^2_s\leq 1$, thus covering K-essence and quintessence cosmologies. We calculate the angular power spectra of standard and relativistic effects for these scenarios under the $\{Q,η\}$ parametrization, and we compare these relative to a fiducial $Λ$CDM cosmology. We find that, overall, deviations relative to $Λ$CDM are stronger at low redshift since the behavior of the dark energy fluid can mimic the cosmological constant during matter domination era but departs during dark energy domination. In particular, at $z=0.1$ the matter density fluctuations are suppressed by up to $\sim3\%$ for the quintessence-like case, while redshift-space distortions and Doppler effect can be enhanced by $\sim15\%$ at large scales for the lowest sound speed scenario. On the other hand, at $z=2$ we find deviations of up to $\sim5\%$ in gravitational lensing, whereas the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect can deviate up to $\sim17\%$. Furthermore, when considering an imperfect dark energy fluid scenario, we find that all effects are insensitive to the presence of anisotropic stress at low redshift, and only the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect can detect this feature at $z=2$ and very large scales.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

GRAMSES: a new route to general relativistic $N$-body simulations in cosmology. Part I. Methodology and code description

We present GRAMSES, a new pipeline for nonlinear cosmological $N$-body simulations in General Relativity (GR). This code adopts the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) formalism of GR, with constant mean curvature and minimum distortion gauge fixings, which provides a fully nonlinear and background independent framework for relativistic cosmology. Employing a fully constrained formulation, the Einstein equations are reduced to a set of ten elliptical equations which are solved using multigrid relaxation with adaptive mesh refinements (AMR), and three hyperbolic equations for the evolution of tensor degrees of freedom. The current version of GRAMSES neglects the latter by using the conformal flatness approximation, which allows it to compute the two scalar and two vector degrees of freedom of the metric. In this paper we describe the methodology, implementation, code tests and first results for cosmological simulations in a $Λ$CDM universe, while the generation of initial conditions and physical results will be discussed elsewhere. Inheriting the efficient AMR and massive parallelisation infrastructure from the publicly-available $N$-body and hydrodynamic simulation code RAMSES, GRAMSES is ideal for studying the detailed behaviour of spacetime inside virialised cosmic structures and hence accurately quantifying the impact of backreaction effects on the cosmic expansion, as well as for investigating GR effects on cosmological observables using cosmic-volume simulations.

astro-ph.CO↗