A new approach to cosmological structure formation with massive neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method to incorporate massive neutrinos and relativistic effects into Newtonian cosmological simulations, enabling more accurate modeling of structure formation without significant additional computational cost.

Contribution

It introduces a new simulation approach that includes massive neutrinos and relativistic effects using tailored initial conditions and interpretation tools, enhancing existing cosmological models.

Findings

Simulation method effectively includes massive neutrinos and relativistic effects.

Approach maintains computational efficiency comparable to standard CDM simulations.

Provides a framework for multi-species cosmological simulations.

Abstract

We show how Newtonian cosmological simulations can be employed to investigate the non-linear evolution of two particle species in a relativistic context. We discuss the application for massive neutrinos and other multi-species systems such as Cold Dark Matter (CDM) plus baryons or Warm Dark Matter (WDM). We propose a method that allows us to perform simulations including massive neutrinos and general relativistic effects at almost the same computational cost as ordinary CDM only N-body simulations, employing tailor-made initial conditions and a dictionary for the interpretation of the simulation output.