MG13 - Talk detail

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Abstract

In a Universe dominated by cold dark matter, structure forms from foldings of a three-dimensional sheet permeating six-dimensional phase space. The dynamics of the sheet is governed by gravity alone, and it never tears or intersects itself in phase space. In position space, these foldings lead to the formation pancakes, filaments and finally dark matter halos: the cosmic web. N-body simulations already follow the motion of this sheet in phase space. This fact can be used to extract full fine-grained phase-space-structure information from existing cosmological N-body simulations. Particles are considered as the vertices of an unstructured three dimensional mesh, moving in six dimensional phase-space. On this mesh, mass density and momentum are uniquely defined. We show how to obtain the space density of the fluid, local velocity dispersion and detect caustics. We also discuss how information about the sheet can be used to create highly accurate volume visualizations of the dark matter distribution in simulations.

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