The Hidden Role of Anisotropies in Shaping Structure Formation in Cosmological N-Body Simulations

TL;DR

This paper reveals that anisotropies introduced by initial particle arrangements in cosmological simulations persist and influence structure formation, highlighting a numerical artifact that challenges assumptions of isotropy in modeling cosmic evolution.

Contribution

It demonstrates that initial anisotropies from lattice structures are amplified by gravity and affect large-scale structures, urging a reassessment of initial condition generation methods.

Findings

Anisotropies are amplified during gravitational evolution.

Anisotropies seed persistent filamentary structures.

These features are numerical artifacts, not physical predictions.

Abstract

Initial conditions in cosmological $N$-body simulations are typically generated by displacing particles from a regular cubic lattice using a correlated field derived from the linear power spectrum, often via the Zel'dovich approximation. While this procedure reproduces the target two-point statistics (e.g., the power spectrum or correlation function), it introduces subtle anisotropies due to the underlying lattice structure. These anisotropies, invisible to angle-averaged diagnostics, become evident through directional measures such as the Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances. Analyzing two Cold Dark Matter simulations with { varying resolutions and box sizes}, we show that these anisotropies are not erased but are amplified by gravitational evolution. They seed filamentary structures that persist into the linear regime, remaining visible even at redshift $z = 0$. Our findings demonstrate that such features are numerical artifacts -- emerging from the anisotropic coupling between the displacement field and the lattice -- not genuine predictions of an isotropic cosmological model. These results underscore the importance of critically reassessing how initial conditions are constructed, particularly when probing the large-scale, quasi-linear regime of structure formation.