arXiv subjects

F. Bernardeau

Publications and source records attributed to F. Bernardeau.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv1999

Nonlinearity and stochasticity in the density--velocity relation

We present results of the investigations of the statistical properties of a joint density and velocity divergence probability distribution function (PDF) in the mildly non-linear regime. For that purpose we use both perturbation theory results, extended here for a top-hat filter, and numerical simulations. In particular we derive the quantitative (complete as possible up to third order terms) and qualitative predictions for constrained averages and constrained dispersions -- which describe the nonlinearities and the stochasticity properties beyond the linear regime -- and compare them against numerical simulations. We find overall a good agreement for constrained averages; however, the agreement for constrained dispersions is only qualitative. Scaling relations for the Omega-dependence of these quantities are satisfactory reproduced. Guided by our analytical and numerical results, we finally construct a robust phenomenological description of the joint PDF in a closed analytic form. The good agreement of our formula with results of N-body simulations for a number of cosmological parameters provides a sound validation of the presented approach. Our results provide a basis for a potentially powerful tool with which it is possible to analyze galaxy survey data in order to test the gravitational instability paradigm beyond the linear regime and put useful constraints on cosmological parameters. In particular we show how the nonlinearity in the density--velocity relation can be used to break the so-called Omega-bias degeneracy in cosmic density-velocity comparisons.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1999

Halo correlations in nonlinear cosmic density fields

The question we address in this paper is the determination of the correlation properties of the dark matter halos appearing in cosmic density fields once they underwent a strongly nonlinear evolution induced by gravitational dynamics. Assuming that the high-order correlation functions of the matter field behave as products of two-body correlation functions, we derive the correlation properties of the halos, that are assumed to represent the correlation properties of galaxies or clusters. The hierarchical pattern originally induced by gravity is shown to be conserved for the halos. The strength of their correlations at any order varies, however, but is found to depend only on their internal properties, namely on the parameter x=m/r^(3-gamma) where m is the mass of the halo, r its size and gammma is the power law index of the two-body correlation function. We were able to derive the explicit form of the generating function of the moments of the halo count probability distribution function. In particular we show explicitely that, generically, S_p(x) -> p^(p-2) in the rare halo limit. Various illustrations of our general results are presented. As a function of the properties of the underlying matter field, we construct the count probabilities for halos and in particular discuss the halo void probability. We also evaluate the dependence of the halo mass function on the environment. We found that within clusters, hierarchical clustering implies the higher masses are favored. We stress that this bias is naturally induced by gravity.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1999

Vorticity generation in large-scale structure caustics

A fundamental hypothesis for the interpretation of the measured large-scale line-of-sight peculiar velocities of galaxies is that the large-scale cosmic flows are irrotational. In order to assess the validity of this assumption, we estimate, within the frame of the gravitational instability scenario, the amount of vorticity generated after the first shell crossings in large-scale caustics. In the Zel'dovich approximation the first emerging singularities form sheet like structures. Here we compute the expectation profile of an initial overdensity under the constraint that it goes through its first shell crossing at the present time. We find that this profile corresponds to rather oblate structures in Lagrangian space. Assuming the Zel'dovich approximation is still adequate not only at the first stages of the evolution but also slightly after the first shell crossing, we calculate the size and shape of those caustics and their vorticity content as a function of time and for different cosmologies. The average vorticity created in these caustics is small: of the order of one (in units of the Hubble constant). To illustrate this point we compute the contribution of such caustics to the probability distribution function of the filtered vorticity at large scales. We find that this contribution that this yields a negligible contribution at the 10 to 15 $h^{-1}$Mpc scales. It becomes significant only at the scales of 3 to 4 $h^{-1}$Mpc, that is, slightly above the galaxy cluster scales.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1999

Gravitational Lenses

The purpose of these lecture notes is to describe the gravitational lens effects in different astrophysical contexts. These notes are voluntarily focused on the fundamental mechanisms and the basic concepts that are useful to describe these effects. The observational consequences are presented in more details in accompanying notes by Y. Mellier. The content of these notes is the following. In the first section describe of the basic mechanisms of gravitational lenses, techniques and approximations that are usually employed. The second section is devoted to the case of a very simple deflector, a point-like mass distribution. This corresponds to microlensing events in which the deflectors are compact objects of a fraction of a solar mass that may populate the halo of our Galaxy. The last two sections are devoted to cosmological applications. After a presentation of the geometrical quantities that are specific to cosmology, I will present the various phenomena that can be observed in this context. Finally I describe the weak lensing regime. This is a rapidly developing area that should eventually allow us to map the mass distribution in the Universe.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1998

Efficiency of weak lensing surveys to probe cosmological models

We apply a mass reconstruction technique to simulated large-scale structure gravitational distortion maps, from 2.5' to 10 degree scales, for different cosmological scenarii. The projected mass is reconstructed using a non-parametric least square method after noise due to the galaxy intrinsic ellipticities has been added on. The shearing of the galaxies is performed using the full lensing equation, without any hypothesis like the weak lensing approximation, or other linearization. It is shown that, in the reconstructed maps the noise acts as a perfect uncorrelated Poisson noise, with no propagation at large scales. The measured power spectrum and first four moments of the convergence can be corrected accurately for this source of noise. Using 60 realizations for each model, we show that a weak lensing survey of 5x5 degrees with a typical sheared background population of 30 gal/arcmin^2 at a redshift z_s=1, is able to probe the amplitude of the power spectrum with a few percents accuracy. Such a survey would lead to a 6 sigma separation between open (Omega=0.3) and flat (Omega=1) model. This separation is shown to be robust against different hypothesis for the normalization or the shape of the power spectrum, and does not require very deep surveys. The observational strategy for an optimal measurement of the power spectrum and the moments of the convergence is discussed.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1998

The effects of source clustering on weak lensing statistics

I investigate the effects of source clustering on the weak lensing statistics, more particularly on the statistical properties of the local convergence, kappa, at large angular scales. The Perturbation Theory approach shows that the variance is not affected by source clustering at leading order but higher order moments such as the third and fourth moments can be. I compute the magnitude of these effects in case of an Einstein-de Sitter Universe for the angular top-hat filtered convergence. In these calculations the so-called Broadhurst and multiple lens coupling effects are neglected. The source clustering effect is found to be particularly important when the redshift distribution is broad enough so that remote background sources can be significantly lensed by closer concentrations of galaxy sources. The source clustering effects are shown to remain negligible, for both the skewness and the kurtosis, when the dispersion of the redshift of the sources is less than about 0.15.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1998

Cosmologie, la formation des grandes structures de l'Univers

Sujets qui sont plus particulierement abordes dans ce cours: 1. Elements de cosmologie, l'Univers homogene Les principes cosmologiques et leurs verifications observationnelles Histoire thermique de l'Univers Inflation, motivations et principe de base 2. Elements de cosmologie, l'Univers inhomogene La croissance des fluctuations Pourquoi un modele avec de la Matiere Noire Froide ? Evidences de l'existence de matiere noire 3. La dynamique gravitationnelle, les theories lineaires L'approximation Newtonnienne avec un seul flot Description Eulerienne ou description Lagrangienne Vers la dynamique non-lineaire: l'effondrement spherique 4. Le regime quasilineaire Effet du couplage de mode: la skewness La hierarchie des correlations en regimes quasi-lineaire Les termes sous-dominants du developpement perturbatif 5. Application aux proprietes statistiques des champs de distorsions gravitationnelles La relation entre convergence locale et densite projetee Variance et skewness de la convergence locale 6. Vers le regime fortement non-lineaire Les solutions auto-similaires et les modeles hierarchiques Distribution de matiere et distribution de lumiere

astro-ph↗

arXiv1998

Lens distortion effects on CMB maps

Weak lensing effects are known to introduce non-linear couplings in CMB temperature maps. In inflationary scenario, the primary CMB anisotropies are expected to form a 2D Gaussian map, for which, the probability distribution function of the ellipticity defined from the local temperature curvature matrix has a very specific shape. I show that lenses alter significantly the shape of this PDF, inducing an excess of elongated structures. The precise functional form is computed for both the field points and the temperature extrema. These analytical results are confirmed by numerical experiments on 10x10 square degree maps. These numerical results allow to investigate the effects of smoothing and to estimate the cosmic variance. For the best resolution and sky coverage of the Planck mission the signal to noise ratio for the statistical indicators presented here is about 3 to 6 depending on the cosmological models. A marginal detection should therefore be possible.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1998

Dark Matter and Gravitational Lensing

The last decade has shown a considerable development of gravitational lensing for cosmology because it probes the amount and the nature of dark matter, and provides information on the density parameter $Ω$, the cosmological constant $Λ$ and the Hubble constant $H_{o}$. Therefore, gravitational lensing can constrain the cosmological scenario which gave birth to the Universe as it appears today. The ongoing programs and future projects which are developing now all over the world show that gravitational lensing is considered as a major cosmological tool for the coming years as well. In this review, we summarize some of the most recent advances in the fields relevant for the dark matter issue. We will focus on the microlensing, the arc(let)s and the weak lensing studies. The possibility to check the existence of a non-zero $Λ$ is presented elsewhere.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1997

The skewness and kurtosis of the projected density distribution function: validity of perturbation theory

We study the domain of validity of Perturbation Theory (PT), by comparing its predictions for the reduced skewness, s_3, and kurtosis, s_4, of the projected cosmological density field, with the results of N-body simulations. We investigate models with different linear power spectra and consider as physical applications both angular galaxy catalogues and weak lensing surveys. We first find that the small-angle approximation for the predicted skewness provides a good match to the exact numerical PT results. On the other hand, results from non-linear simulated catalogues agree well with PT results on quasi-linear angular scales, which correspond to scales larger than about 1 degree in the applications we have considered. We also point out that, on smaller scale, the projection effects tend to attenuate the effects of the strong nonlinearities in the angular skewness and kurtosis.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1997

Weak Lensing Statistics as a Probe of Omega and Power Spectrum

The possibility of detecting weak lensing effects from deep wide field imaging surveys has open new means of probing the large-scale structures of the Universe and measuring cosmological parameters. In this paper we present a systematic study of the expected dependence of the low order moments of the filtered gravitational local convergence with the power spectrum of the density fluctuations and with the cosmological parameters Omega_0 and Lambda. The results show a significant dependence with all these parameters. Though we note that this degeneracy could be partially raised by considering two populations of sources, at different redshifts, computing the third moment is more promising since it is expected, in the quasi-linear regime and for Gaussian initial conditions, to be only $Ω_0$ dependent (with a slight degeneracy with Lambda) when it is correctly expressed in terms of the second moment. More precisely we show that the variance of the convergence varies approximately as P(k) Omega_0^{1.5} z_s^{1.5}, whereas the skewness varies as Omega_0^{-0.8} z_s^{-1.35}, where P(k) is the projected power spectrum and z_s the redshift of sources. Thus, used jointly they can provide both P(k) and Omega_0. However, the dependence with the redshift of sources is large and could be a major concern for a practical implementation. We have estimated the errors expected for these parameters in realistic scenario and sketched what would be the observational requirements for doing such measurements. A more detailed study of an observational strategy is left for a second paper.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1997

Scaling in Gravitational Clustering, 2D and 3D Dynamics

Perturbation Theory (PT) applied to a cosmological density field with Gaussian initial fluctuations suggests a specific hierarchy for the correlation functions when the variance is small. In particular quantitative predictions have been made for the moments and the shape of the one-point probability distribution function (PDF) of the top-hat smoothed density. In this paper we perform a series of systematic checks of these predictions against N-body computations both in 2D and 3D with a wide range of featureless power spectra. In agreement with previous studies, we found that the reconstructed PDF-s work remarkably well down to very low probabilities, even when the variance approaches unity. Our results for 2D reproduce the features for the 3D dynamics. In particular we found that the PT predictions are more accurate for spectra with less power on small scales. The nonlinear regime has been explored with various tools, PDF-s, moments and Void Probability Function (VPF). These studies have been done with unprecedented dynamical range, especially for the 2D case, allowing in particular more robust determinations of the asymptotic behaviour of the VPF. We have also introduced a new method to determine the moments based on the factorial moments. Results using this method and taking into account the finite volume effects are presented.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1997

The Omega dependence of the velocity divergence distribution

Analytical studies based on perturbative theory have shown that the moments of the Probability Distribution Function (PDF) of the local smoothed velocity divergence are expected to have a very specific dependence on the density parameter Omega in the quasi-linear regime. This dependence is particularly interesting as it does not involve the possible bias between the galaxy spatial distribution and the underlying mass distribution. This implies a new and promising method for determining a bias-independent value of Omega based on a reliable determination of the velocity divergence PDF. In this paper we study the Omega dependence of the velocity divergence PDF and its first moments in a set of N-body simulations, using the so-called Voronoi and Delaunay methods. We show that this dependence is in agreement with the theoretical prediction, even while the number density of velocity field tracers has been diluted to a value comparable to that available in current galaxy catalogues. In addition, we demonstrate that a sufficiently reliable determination of these statistical quantities is also possible when the measurement of the galaxy peculiar velocities is restricted to the one component along the line-of-sight. Under ideal, noise-free circumstances we can successfully discriminate between low and high Omega.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1997

Weak Lensing Detection in CMB Maps

The weak lensing effects are known to change only weakly the shape of the power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature fluctuations. I show here that they nonetheless induce specific non-Gaussian effects that can be detectable with the four-point correlation function of the CMB anisotropies. The magnitude and geometrical dependences of this correlation function are investigated in detail. It is thus found to scale as the square of the derivative of the two-point correlation function and as the angular correlation function of the gravitational displacement field. It also contains specific dependences on the shape of the quadrangle formed by the four directions. When averaged at a given scale, the four-point function, that identifies with the connected part of the fourth moment of the probability distribution function of the local filtered temperature, scales as the square of logarithmic slope of its second moment, and as the variance of the gravitational magnification at the same angular scale. All these effects have been computed for specific cosmological models. It is worth noting that, as the amplitude of the gravitational lens effects has a specific dependence on the cosmological parameters, the detection of the four-point correlation function could provide precious complementary constraints to those brought by the temperature power spectrum.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1996

Extended Perturbation Theory for the Local Density Distribution Function

Perturbation theory makes it possible to calculate the probability distribution function (PDF) of the large scale density field in the small variance limit. For top hat smoothing and scale-free Gaussian initial fluctuations, the result depends only on the linear variance, sigma_linear, and its logarithmic derivative with respect to the filtering scale -(n_linear+3)=dlog sigma_linear^2/dlog L (Bernardeau 1994). In this paper, we measure the PDF and its low-order moments in scale-free simulations evolved well into the nonlinear regime and compare the results with the above predictions, assuming that the spectral index and the variance are adjustable parameters, n_eff and sigma_eff=sigma, where sigma is the true, nonlinear variance. With these additional degrees of freedom, results from perturbation theory provide a good fit of the PDFs, even in the highly nonlinear regime. The value of n_eff is of course equal to n_linear when sigma << 1, and it decreases with increasing sigma. A nearly flat plateau is reached when sigma >> 1. In this regime, the difference between n_eff and n_linear increases when n_linear decreases. For initial power-spectra with n_linear=-2,-1,0,+1, we find n_eff ~ -9,-3,-1,-0.5 when sigma^2 ~ 100.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1996

Recent Advances in Gravitational Lensing

The gravitational lensing effect is one of the most promising tools for cosmology. Indeed it probes directly the total mass distribution in large-scale structures and can as well provide valuable informations on the values of the density parameter Omega and the cosmological constant lambda. In this review we summarize the most spectacular observational and theoretical advances obtained in this field during the last five years.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1996

Large-Scale Structure Formation in the Quasi-linear Regime

The understanding of the large-scale structure formation requires the resolution of coupled nonlinear equations describing the cosmic density and velocity fields. This is a complicated problem that, for the last decade, has been essentially addressed with N-body simulations. There is however a regime, the so-called quasi-linear regime, for which the relative density fluctuations are on average below unity. It is then possible to apply Perturbation Theory techniques where the perturbation expansions are made with respect to the initial fluctuations. I review here the major results that have been obtained in this regime.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1996

The large-scale Gravitational Bias from the Quasilinear Regime

It is known that in gravitational instability scenarios the nonlinear dynamics induces non-Gaussian features in cosmological density fields that can be investigated with perturbation theory. Here, I derive the expression of the joint moments of cosmological density fields taken at two different locations. The results are valid when the density fields are filtered with a top-hat filter window function, and when the distance between the two cells is large compared to the smoothing length. In particular I show that it is possible to get the generating function of the coefficients C_{p,q} defined by < delta^p(x_1) delta^q(x_2) >_c= C_{p,q} < delta^2(x) >^{p+q-2} < delta(x_1) delta(x_2) > where delta(x) is the local smoothed density field. It is then possible to reconstruct the joint density probability distribution function (PDF), generalizing for two points what has been obtained previously for the one-point density PDF. I discuss the validity of the large separation approximation in an explicit numerical Monte Carlo integration of the C_{2,1} parameter as a function of |x_1-x_2|. A straightforward application is the calculation of the large-scale `bias' properties of the over-dense (or under-dense) regions. The properties and the shape of the bias function are presented in detail and successfully compared with numerical results obtained in an N-body simulation with CDM initial conditions.

astro-ph↗