Related papers: Some Statistics for Measuring Large-Scale Structur…
In this review, we describe our current understanding of cluster formation: from the general picture of collapse from initial density fluctuations in an expanding Universe to detailed simulations of cluster formation including the effects…
We compare a large suite of theoretical cosmological models to observational data from the cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillation measurements of expansion, Type Ia SNe measurements of expansion, redshift space distortion…
The high precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background by the Planck survey yielded tight constraints on cosmological parameters and the statistics of the density fluctuations at the time of recombination. This provides the…
The gravitational evolution of the genus and other statistics of isodensity contours of the density field is derived analytically in a weakly nonlinear regime using second-order perturbation theory. The effect of final smoothing in…
To understand the universe and to interpret the cosmological parameters governing its evolution it is necessary to contrast the data from galaxy surveys with simulation. Typically it entails using computationally expensive N -body…
The most popular tools for analysing the large scale distribution of galaxies are second-order spatial statistics such as the two-point correlation function or its Fourier transform, the power spectrum. In this review, we explain how our…
A quantitative theory, based on the Zeldovich approximation, to provide an approximate description of the evolution of structure is presented. We give an expression for the characteristic scale of superlarge-scale structure which can also…
We study structure formation in a set of cosmological simulations to uncover the scales in the initial density field that gave rise to the formation of present-day structures. Our simulations share a common primordial power spectrum (here…
We propose and investigate a new algorithm for quantifying the topological properties of cosmological density fluctuations. We first motivate this algorithm by drawing a formal distinction between two definitions of relevant topological…
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…
Weak gravitational lensing has become an important method to determine the masses of galaxy clusters. The intrinsic shapes of the galaxies are a dominant source of uncertainty, but there are other limitations to the precision that can be…
We examine the errors on counts in cells extracted from galaxy surveys. The measurement error, related to the finite number of sampling cells, is disentangled from the ``cosmic error'', due to the finiteness of the survey. Using the…
The search for cosmic strings has been of renewed interest with the advent of precision cosmology. In this note we give a quantitative description of the nonlinear matter density fluctuations that can form from a scaling network of cosmic…
The changes of main paradigms on the structure and evolution of the Universe are reviewed. Two puzzles of the modern cosmology, the mean density of matter and the regularity of the Universe on large scales, as well as the possibility to…
This thesis focuses on characterizing the distribution of points and galaxies using multifractal analysis. In this attempt the main emphasis is on calculating the Minkowski-Bouligand fractal dimension (Dq) of the distribution of points over…
We present structural properties of two-dimensional polymers as far as they can be described by percolation theory. The percolation threshold, critical exponents and fractal dimensions of clusters are determined by computer simulation and…
The topology of large scale structure is studied as a function of galaxy type using the genus statistic. In hydrodynamical cosmological CDM simulations, galaxies form on caustic surfaces (Zeldovich pancakes) then slowly drain onto filaments…
I review the status of large-scale structure studies based on redshift surveys of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. In particular, I compare recent results on the power spectrum and two-point correlation correlation function from the 2dF…
Context: The number of known strong gravitational lenses is expected to grow substantially in the next few years. The statistical combination of large samples of lenses has the potential of providing strong constraints on the inner…
Two coarse-grained models which capture some universal characteristics of stripe forming systems are stud- ied. At high temperatures, the structure factors of both models attain their maxima on a circle in reciprocal space, as a consequence…