Structures in the Dark matter Universe

As a part of my doctoral dissertation under Professor Sergei Shandarin, I work on problems regarding Dark Matter clustering in the Universe. Recent developments in numerical analysis of cosmological simulations have hinted towards dynamical information of gravitational clustering. This is inferred from a six-dimensional Lagrangian sub-manifold – comprising of initial and final co-ordinates of dark matter particles. Velocity multi-stream fields that are derived from this sub-manifold have shed new light on the nature of Dark matter Universe. One such high-resolution analysis of dark matter halo (most dense regions in the Dark Matter Universe) environments run on the cluster computation facilities at the Center for Research Computing, University of Kansas is shown below:

We have extended our work to topological and geometrical descriptions of the cosmic web. Percolation studies on cosmic fields display a transitions in connectivities of structures, and Hessian analysis delineates structures with different shapes – tubular, sheet-like, or globular. Our recent paper claims that the over 99 per cent of the voids are connected. Another geometrical analyses has paved the way for detection of haloes in numerical simulations. We have developed a halo-finder algorithm based on the compact geometries of the halo surfaces and the number of gravitational collapses undergone by dark matter particles. This detection of potential halo regions does not require use free-parameters or post-processing tools that are generally used in traditional halo finder algorithms.