The gravitational force field of proto-pancakes

Abstract

It is well known that the first structures that form from small fluctuations in a self-gravitating, collisionless and initially smooth cold dark matter (CDM) fluid are pancakes. We study the gravitational force generated by such pancakes just after shell-crossing, and find a simple analytical formula for the force along the collapse direction, which can be applied to both the single- and multi-stream regimes. The formula is tested on the early growth of CDM protohaloes seeded by two or three crossed sine waves. Adopting the high-order Lagrangian perturbation theory (LPT) solution as a proxy for the dynamics, we confirm that our analytical prediction agrees well with the exact solution computed by direct resolution of the Poisson equation, as long as the caustic structure remains locally sufficiently one-dimensional. These results are further confirmed by comparisons of the LPT predictions performed this way to measurements in Vlasov simulations performed with the public code ColDICE. We also show that the component of the force orthogonal to the collapse direction preserves its single stream nature by not changing qualitatively before and after the collapse, allowing sufficiently high-order LPT acceleration to be used to approximate it accurately as long as the LPT series converges. As expected, solving Poisson equation on the density field generated with LPT displacement provides a more accurate force than the LPT acceleration itself, as a direct consequence of the faster convergence of the LPT series for the positions than for the accelerations. This may provide a clue on improving standard LPT predictions. Our investigations represent a very needed first step to study analytically gravitational dynamics in the multi-stream regime, by estimating, at leading order in time and space the proper backreaction on the gravitational field inside the pancakes.