First investigation of void statistics in numerical relativity simulations
Abstract
We apply and extend standard tools for void statistics to cosmological simulations that solve Einstein's equations with numerical relativity (NR). We obtain a simulated void catalogue without Newtonian approximations, using a new watershed void finder which operates on fluid-based NR simulations produced with the Einstein Toolkit. We compare and contrast measures of void size and void fraction, and compare radial stacked density profiles to empirically-derived Hamaus-Sutter-Wandelt (HSW) density profiles and profiles based on distance to void boundaries. We recover statistics roughly consistent with Newtonian N-body simulations where such a comparison is meaningful. We study variation of dynamical spatial curvature and local expansion explicitly demonstrating the spatial fluctuations of these quantities in void regions. We find that voids in our simulations expand ~10-30% faster than the global average and the spatial curvature density parameter in the centre of voids reaches ~60-80%.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2403.15134,
title = {First investigation of void statistics in numerical relativity simulations},
author = {Michael J. Williams and Hayley J. Macpherson and David L. Wiltshire and Chris Stevens},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.15134},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
15 pages, 14 figures; v2: Clarifications and references added, matches published version in MNRAS