The features of the Cosmic Web unveiled by the flip-flop field

TL;DR

This paper investigates the flip-flop field in dark matter simulations, revealing its stability over time and its ability to encode the merging history of dark matter haloes, offering new insights into cosmic web structure.

Contribution

It introduces the flip-flop field as a novel diagnostic in dark matter simulations and demonstrates its stability and historical information content over cosmic time.

Findings

Flip-flop field remains stable from z=30 to present.

Flip-flop field encodes merging history of dark matter haloes.

The pattern of the flip-flop field is remarkably stable over time.

Abstract

Understanding of the observed structure in the universe can be reached only in the theoretical framework of dark matter. N-body simulations are indispensable for the analysis of the formation and evolution of the dark matter web. Two primary fields - density and velocity fields - are used in most of studies. However dark matter provides two additional fields which are unique for collisionless media only. These are the multi- stream field in Eulerian space and flip-flop field in Lagrangian space. The flip-flop field represents the number of sign reversals of an elementary volume of each collisionless fluid element. This field can be estimated by counting the sign reversals of the Jacobian at each particle at every time step of the simulation. The Jacobian is evaluated by numerical differentiation of the Lagrangian submanifold, i.e., the three-dimensional dark matter sheet in the six-dimensional space formed by three Lagrangian and three Eulerian coordinates. We present the results of the statistical study of the evolution of the flip-flop field from z = 50 to the present time z = 0. A number of statistical characteristics show that the pattern of the flip-flop field remains remarkably stable from z = 30 to the present time. As a result the flip-flop field evaluated at z = 0 stores a wealth of information about the dynamical history of the dark matter web. In particular one of the most intriguing properties of the flip-flop is a unique capability to preserve the information about the merging history of dark matter haloes.