Perturbative interaction approach to cosmological structure formation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a perturbative approach to cosmological structure formation that improves upon standard linear theory by accounting for nonlinear interactions, providing more accurate power spectrum predictions at nonlinear scales.

Contribution

It rederives the nonlinear matter power spectrum using a different perturbative method, extending the analysis to arbitrary order in the linear power spectrum and highlighting limitations of linear perturbation theory.

Findings

The power spectrum is well-behaved at large wavenumbers.

Standard linear perturbation theory underestimates the power spectrum at finite interaction orders.

The new approach aligns better with numerical simulations for nonlinear scales.

Abstract

A new approach to cosmological perturbation theory has been recently introduced by Bartelmann et al., relying on nonequilibrium statistical theory of classical particles, and treating the gravitational interaction perturbatively. They compute analytic expressions for the nonlinear matter power spectrum, to first order in the interaction, and at one-loop order in the linear power spectrum. The resulting power spectrum is well behaved even at large wavenumbers and seems in good agreement with results from numerical simulations. In this paper, we rederive their results concisely with a different approach, starting from the implicit integral solution to particle trajectories. We derive the matter power spectrum to first order in the interaction, but to arbitrary order in the linear power spectrum, from which the one-loop result follows. We also show that standard linear perturbation theory can only be recovered at infinite order in the gravitational interaction. At finite order in the interaction, we find that the linear power spectrum is systematically and significantly underestimated. A comprehensive study of the convergence of the theory with the order of the interaction for nonlinear scales will be the subject of future work.