Simulating nonlinear cosmological structure formation with massive neutrinos
Abstract
We present a new method for simulating cosmologies that contain massive particles with thermal free streaming motion, such as massive neutrinos or warm/hot dark matter. This method combines particle and fluid descriptions of the thermal species to eliminate the shot noise known to plague conventional N-body simulations. We describe this method in detail, along with results for a number of test cases to validate our method, and check its range of applicability. Using this method, we demonstrate that massive neutrinos can produce a significant scale-dependence in the large-scale biasing of deep voids in the matter field. We show that this scale-dependence may be quantitatively understood using an extremely simple spherical expansion model which reproduces the behavior of the void bias for different neutrino parameters.
- Publication:
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Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
- Pub Date:
- November 2016
- DOI:
- 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/11/015
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1606.06167
- Bibcode:
- 2016JCAP...11..015B
- Keywords:
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- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 20 pages, to be submitted to JCAP