Orientation of cosmic web filaments with respect to the underlying velocity field

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to show that filaments in the cosmic web, identified through halo distributions with the Bisous model, are strongly aligned with the local velocity shear tensor's eigenvector, revealing their physical significance.

Contribution

It demonstrates that halo-based filament detection aligns with the velocity shear tensor, providing a new method to analyze cosmic web structures without prior assumptions.

Findings

80% of filaments are within 30 degrees of the eigenvector e3

High overlap (90%) between P-web and V-web filaments in dense regions

P-web filaments often mark sheets in the V-web in lower density areas

Abstract

The large-scale structure of the Universe is characterised by a web-like structure made of voids, sheets, filaments, and knots. The structure of this so-called cosmic web is dictated by the local velocity shear tensor. In particular, the local direction of a filament should be strongly aligned with e3, the eigenvector associated with the smallest eigenvalue of the tensor. That conjecture is tested here on the basis of a cosmological simulation. The cosmic web delineated by the halo distribution is probed by a marked point process with interactions (the Bisous model), detecting filaments directly from the halo distribution (P-web). The detected P-web filaments are found to be strongly aligned with the local e3: the alignment is within 30 degree for 80% of the elements. This indicates that large-scale filaments defined purely from the distribution of haloes carry more than just morphological information, although the Bisous model does not make any prior assumption on the underlying shear tensor. The P-web filaments are also compared to the structure revealed from the velocity shear tensor itself (V-web). In the densest regions, the P- and V-web filaments overlap well (90%), whereas in lower density regions, the P-web filaments preferentially mark sheets in the V-web.