Related papers: Comment on "N-body simulations of gravitational dy…
High resolution dark matter only simulations provide a realistic and fully general means to study the theoretical predictions of cosmological structure formation models for gravitational lensing. Due to the finite number of particles, the…
Wang and White (2007) have discussed some problems with N-body simulation methods. These problems are a special case of a more general problem which has been largely unacknowledged for approximately 25 years, and affects results of all dark…
Simulations of purely self-gravitating N-body systems are often used in astrophysics and cosmology to study the collisionless limit of such systems. Their results for macroscopic quantities should then converge well for sufficiently large…
N-Body simulations are a very important tool in the study of formation of large scale structures. Much of the progress in understanding the physics of galaxy formation and comparison with observations would not have been possible without…
In self-consistent N-body simulations of collisionless systems, gravitational interactions are modified on small scales to remove singularities and simplify the task of numerically integrating the equations of motion. This `gravitational…
Cosmological N-body simulations aim to calculate the non-linear gravitational growth of structures via particle dynamics. A crucial problem concerns the setting-up of the initial particle distribution, as standard theories of galaxy…
N-Body simulations are an important tool in the study of formation of large scale structures. Much of the progress in understanding the physics of galaxy clustering and comparison with observations would not have been possible without…
We describe the astrophysical and numerical basis of N-body simulations, both of collisional stellar systems (dense star clusters and galactic centres) and collisionless stellar dynamics (galaxies and large-scale structure). We explain and…
Two-body scattering and other discreteness effects are unimportant in cosmological gravitational clustering in most scenarios, since the dark matter has a small particle mass. The collective field should determine evolution: Two-body…
Gravitational softening length is one of the key parameters to properly set up a cosmological $N$-body simulation. In this paper, we perform a large suit of high-resolution $N$-body simulations to revise the optimal softening scheme…
Numerical simulations of self-gravitating systems are generally based on N-body codes, which solve the equations of motion of a large number of interacting particles. This approach suffers from poor statistical sampling in regions of low…
On large-scales, comparable to the horizon, the observable clustering properties of galaxies are affected by various general relativistic effects. To calculate these effects one needs to consistently solve for the metric, densities and…
The gravitationally-driven evolution of cold dark matter dominates the formation of structure in the Universe over a wide range of length scales. While the longest scales can be treated by perturbation theory, a fully quantitative…
We study the accumulation of errors in cosmological N-body algorithms that are caused by representing the continuous distribution of matter by massive particles, comparing the PPPM and Adaptive Multigrid codes. We use for this a new measure…
Dynamical simulations are a fundamental tool for studying the secular evolution of disc galaxies. Even at their maximum resolution, they still follow a limited number of particles and typically resolve scales of the order of a few tens of…
We present the problematic of controlling the discreteness effects in cosmological N-body simulations. We describe a perturbative treatment which gives an approximation describing the evolution under self-gravity of a lattice perturbed from…
Using the Ricci and scalar curvatures of the configuration manifold of gravitational N-body systems, we study the exponential instability in their trajectories. It is found that the exponentiation time-scale for isotropic Plummer spheres…
In cosmology numerical simulations of structure formation are now of central importance, as they are the sole instrument for providing detailed predictions of current cosmological models for a whole class of important constraining…
Melott has made pioneering studies of the effects of particle discreteness in N-body simulations, a fundamental point that needs careful thought and analysis since all such simulations suffer from numerical noise arising from the use of…
Cosmological N-Body simulations have become an essential tool for studying formation of large scale structure. These simulations are computationally challenging even though the available computing power gets better every year. A number of…