The effect of primordial non-Gaussianity on the topology of large-scale structure

Abstract

We study the effect of primordial non-Gaussianity on the development of large-scale cosmic structure using high-resolution N-body simulations. In particular, we focus on the topological properties of the 'cosmic web', quantitatively characterized by the Minkowski functionals (MFs), for models with quadratic non-linearities with different values of the usual non-Gaussianity parameter fNL. In the weakly non-linear regime (the amplitude of mass density fluctuations σ0 < 0.1), we find that analytic formulae derived from perturbation theory agree with the numerical results within a few per cent of the amplitude of each MF when |fNL| < 1000. In the non-linear regime, the detailed behaviour of the MFs as functions of threshold density deviates more strongly from the analytical curves, while the overall amplitude of the primordial non-Gaussian effect remains comparable to the perturbative prediction. When smaller-scale information is included, the influence of primordial non-Gaussianity becomes increasingly significant statistically due to decreasing sample variance. We find that the effect of the primordial non-Gaussianity with |fNL| = 50 is comparable to the sample variance of mass density fields with a volume of 0.125(h-1 Gpc)3 when they are smoothed by Gaussian filter at a scale of 5 h-1 Mpc. The detectability of this effect in actual galaxy surveys will strongly depend on residual uncertainties in cosmological parameters and galaxy biasing. © 2008 RAS.