The Caustic Design of the Dark Matter Web
Matter density is formally infinite at the location of caustic surfaces, where dark matter sheet folds in phase-space. The caustics separate regions with different number of streams and the volume elements change the parity by turning inside out when passing through the caustic stage. Being measure-zero structures, identification of caustics via matter density fields is usually restricted to fine-grained simulations. Here we employ a generic algorithm to identify caustics directly using the triangulation of the Lagrangian sub-manifold x(q,t) obtained in N-body simulations. In our approach the caustic surfaces are approximated by a set of triangles whose vertices are particles of the simulation. The major obstacle we encountered was insufficient sampling of small scale perturbations. We overcame it by a brute force approach. We continued to raise the scale of the cutoff in the initial power spectrum until obtained the reliable resolution of the caustics shells up to seven layers. Although quite modest, our result is the first reliable direct construction of caustic surfaces in N-body simulation. It reveals a number of unexpected geometrical features. In particular shapes of some of them are contrastingly different from the known shapes of the caustics formed in the Zeldovich approximation.