An Alternative to Grids and Glasses: Quaquaversal Pre-Initial Conditions for N-Body Simulations
Résumé
N-body simulations sample their initial conditions on an initial particle distribution, which for cosmological simulations is usually a glass or grid, while a Poisson distribution is used for galaxy models, spherical collapse, etc. These pre-initial conditions have inherent correlations, noise due to discreteness, and preferential alignments, while the glass distribution is poorly defined and computationally expensive to construct. We present a novel particle distribution that can be useful as a pre-initial condition for N-body simulations, using a simple construction based on a "quaquaversal'' tiling of space. This distribution has little preferred orientation (i.e., is statistically isotropic), has a rapidly vanishing large-scale power spectrum [P(k)~k4], and is trivial to create. It should be particularly useful for warm dark matter and cold collapse simulations.