Universe Colloquium: Large scale structure formation with the Schrödinger method

by Cora Uhlemann (LMU)

Wednesday 28 May 2014, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

seminar room (Excellence Cluster Universe, Boltzmannstrasse 2, Garching)

When describing large-scale stucture formation of collisionless dark matter one is interested in the dynamics of a large collection of identical point particles that interact only gravitationally. Via gravitational instabilty initially small density perturbations evolve into eventually bound structures, like halos that are distributed along the cosmic web. Even though this problem seems quite simple from a conceptual point of view, no general solution is known and one has to resort to N-body simulations. Analytical methods to describe structure formation are in general based on the dust model which describes cold dark matter as a pressureless fluid characterized by density and velocity. This model works quite well up to the quasi-linear regime but necessarily fails when multiple streams form that are especially important for halo formation but lead to singularities in the model. We employ the so-called Schrödinger method to develop a model which is able to describe multi-streaming and therefore can serve as theoretical N-body double and replacement for the dust model. The Universe Colloquium is followed by a social gathering with wine and cheese.