Merging and fragmentation in the Burgers dynamics

TL;DR

This paper investigates the geometrical evolution of matter in the inviscid Burgers dynamics, revealing how halo fragmentation and merging processes occur in higher dimensions within the cosmological adhesion model.

Contribution

It introduces a geometrical framework using Legendre transforms and convex hulls to analyze halo formation, fragmentation, and merging in the Burgers dynamics across multiple dimensions.

Findings

Halo fragmentation occurs in dimensions ≥ 2.

Two-body collisions produce new shock nodes.

Halo mergers involve three-body interactions.

Abstract

We explore the noiseless Burgers dynamics in the inviscid limit, the so-called ``adhesion model'' in cosmology, in a regime where (almost) all the fluid particles are embedded within point-like massive halos. Following previous works, we focus our investigations on a ``geometrical'' model, where the matter evolution within the shock manifold is defined from a geometrical construction. This hypothesis is at variance with the assumption that the usual continuity equation holds but, in the inviscid limit, both models agree in the regular regions. Taking advantage of the formulation of the dynamics of this ``geometrical model'' in terms of Legendre transforms and convex hulls, we study the evolution with time of the distribution of matter and the associated partitions of the Lagrangian and Eulerian spaces. We describe how the halo mass distribution derives from a triangulation in Lagrangian space, while the dual Voronoi-like tessellation in Eulerian space gives the boundaries of empty regions with shock nodes at their vertices. We then emphasize that this dynamics actually leads to halo fragmentations for space dimensions greater or equal to 2 (for the inviscid limit studied in this article). This is most easily seen from the properties of the Lagrangian-space triangulation and we illustrate this process in the two-dimensional (2D) case. In particular, we explain how point-like halos only merge through three-body collisions while two-body collisions always give rise to two new massive shock nodes (in 2D). This generalizes to higher dimensions and we briefly illustrate the three-dimensional (3D) case. This leads to a specific picture for the continuous formation of massive halos through successive halo fragmentations and mergings.