On the Statistical Evolution of the Large-scale Structure and the Effective Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a PDF-based formalism to describe the statistical evolution of large-scale cosmic structures, offering new insights into effective dynamics and scale interactions beyond traditional perturbation methods.

Contribution

It introduces a PDF evolution equation for large-scale structures, linking effective dynamics to statistical conservation, and extends analysis beyond standard perturbation theory.

Findings

Derives a PDF-based evolution equation for large-scale cosmic fields

Shows effective dynamics are valid only at the statistical level

Provides a framework to measure effective terms from simulations

Abstract

In this paper, we study the statistical evolution of the large-scale structure (LSS), focusing on the joint probability distribution function (PDF) of the coarse-grained cosmic field and its role in constructing effective dynamics. As the most comprehensive statistics, this PDF encodes all cosmological information of large-scale modes, therefore, could serve as the basis in the LSS modelling. Following the so-called PDF-based method from turbulence, we write down this PDF's evolution equation, which describes the probability conservation. We show that this conservation equation's characteristic curves follow the same PDF history and could be considered as an effective dynamics of the coarse-grained field. Unlike the EFT of LSS, which conceptually would work at both realization and statistics level, this effective dynamics is valid only statistically. However, this `statistical equivalence' also provides valuable insight into scale interactions at the statistical level. It also enables predicting a wide variety of statistics beyond the typical N-point polyspectra, including, e.g. topologies, density PDF and non-linear covariance matrices etc. Our formula expresses the small-scale effect as the ensemble average of their interactions conditional on the large-scale modes. This suggests an interesting way to measure effective terms directly from simulation. By applying the Gram-Charlier expansion, we demonstrate a different structure of these effective terms. This formalism is a natural framework for discussing the evolution of statistical properties of large-scale modes, and provides an alternative view for understanding the relationship between general effective dynamics and standard perturbation theory.