2004/11/30 by M. Joyce, Michael Joyce, D. Levesque +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Scientific Research and Discoveries #astro-ph #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.72.103509
published as Phys.Rev. D72 (2005) 103509 · 18 pages, 11 figures; revised version with 2 new figures, results for larger simulations, new discussion of generation of velocities and some other issues
arxiv created 2005/06/24 · openalex publication_date 2005/11/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the possibility of generating initial conditions for cosmological N-body simulations by simulating a system whose correlations at thermal equilibrium approximate well those of cosmological density perturbations. The system is an appropriately modified version of the standard ``one component plasma'' (OCP). We show first how a well-known semianalytic method can be used to determine the potential required to produce the desired correlations, and then verify our results for some cosmological type spectra with simulations of the full molecular dynamics. The advantage of the method, compared to the standard one, is that it gives by construction an accurate representation of both the real and reciprocal space correlation properties of the theoretical model. Furthermore the distributions are also statistically homogeneous and isotropic. We discuss briefly the modifications needed to implement the method to produce configurations appropriate for large N-body simulations in cosmology, and also the generation of initial velocities in this context.