sCOLA: The N-body COLA Method Extended to the Spatial Domain

Abstract

We present sCOLA -- an extension of the N-body COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (COLA) method to the spatial domain. Similar to the original temporal-domain COLA, sCOLA is an N-body method for solving for large-scale structure in a frame that is comoving with observers following trajectories calculated in Lagrangian Perturbation Theory. Incorporating the sCOLA method in an N-body code allows one to gain computational speed by capturing the gravitational potential from the far field using perturbative techniques, while letting the N-body code solve only for the near field. The far and near fields are completely decoupled, effectively localizing gravity for the N-body side of the code. Thus, running an N-body code for a small simulation volume using sCOLA can reproduce the results of a standard N-body run for the same small volume embedded inside a much larger simulation. We demonstrate that sCOLA can be safely combined with the original temporal-domain COLA. sCOLA can be used as a method for performing zoom-in simulations. It also allows N-body codes to be made embarrassingly parallel, thus allowing for efficiently tiling a volume of interest using grid computing. Moreover, sCOLA can be useful for cheaply generating large ensembles of accurate mock halo catalogs required to study galaxy clustering. Surveys that will benefit the most are ones with large aspect ratios, such as pencil-beam surveys, where sCOLA can easily capture the effects of large-scale transverse modes without the need to substantially increase the simulated volume. As an illustration of the method, we present proof-of-concept zoom-in simulations using a freely available sCOLA-based N-body code.

arXiv comment18 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (19)

• The Clustering of the SDSS DR7 Main Galaxy Sample I: A 4 per cent Distance Measure at z=0.15
• Transients from Initial Conditions in Cosmological Simulations
• The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: Improved Distance Measurements to z = 1 with Reconstruction of the Baryonic Acoustic Feature
• Solving Large Scale Structure in Ten Easy Steps with COLA
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: a large sample of mock galaxy catalogues
• Convolution Lagrangian perturbation theory for biased tracers
• EZmocks: extending the Zel'dovich approximation to generate mock galaxy catalogues with accurate clustering statistics
• PTHalos: A fast method for generating mock galaxy distributions
• Mock galaxy catalogs using the quick particle mesh method
• An accurate tool for the fast generation of dark matter halo catalogs
• A new way of setting the phases for cosmological multi-scale Gaussian initial conditions
• nIFTy Cosmology: Galaxy/halo mock catalogue comparison project on clustering statistics
• Constraining the halo bispectrum in real and redshift space from perturbation theory and non-linear stochastic bias
• HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
• Bayesian analysis of the dynamic cosmic web in the SDSS galaxy survey
• Lagrangian or Eulerian; Real or Fourier? Not All Approaches to Large-Scale Structure Are Created Equal
• Dark matter voids in the SDSS galaxy survey
• One-point remapping of Lagrangian perturbation theory in the mildly non-linear regime of cosmic structure formation
• One-point statistics of the Lagrangian displacement field

Cited by in corpus (26)

• The Effective Field Theorist's Approach to Gravitational Dynamics
• ICE-COLA: Towards fast and accurate synthetic galaxy catalogues optimizing a quasi $N$-body method
• COLA with scale-dependent growth: applications to screened modified gravity models
• The Effect of Fiber Collisions on the Galaxy Power Spectrum Multipole
• Fast and Credible Likelihood-Free Cosmology with Truncated Marginal Neural Ratio Estimation
• CARPool: fast, accurate computation of large-scale structure statistics by pairing costly and cheap cosmological simulations
• Solving the Vlasov equation in two spatial dimensions with the Schrödinger method
• Aemulus $\nu$: Precise Predictions for Matter and Biased Tracer Power Spectra in the Presence of Neutrinos
• ICE-COLA: fast simulations for weak lensing observables
• Measuring the Tidal Response of Structure Formation: Anisotropic Separate Universe Simulations using TreePM
• Galaxy 2-Point Covariance Matrix Estimation for Next Generation Surveys
• Accurate predictions from small boxes: variance suppression via the Zel'dovich approximation
• Simulating cosmologies beyond $\Lambda$CDM with PINOCCHIO
• Enabling matter power spectrum emulation in beyond-$\Lambda$CDM cosmologies with COLA
• Bayesian cosmic density field inference from redshift space dark matter maps
• Accurate halo-galaxy mocks from automatic bias estimation and particle mesh gravity solvers
• Halo mass and weak galaxy-galaxy lensing profiles in rescaled cosmological $N$-body simulations
• Perfectly parallel cosmological simulations using spatial comoving Lagrangian acceleration
• Revisiting Vainshtein Screening for fast N-body simulations
• Choose to smooth: Gaussian streaming with the truncated Zel'dovich approximation
• The importance of the cosmic web and halo substructure for power spectra
• Non-linear Structure Formation for Dark Energy Models with a Steep Equation of State
• Refining the nonlinear modelling of primordial oscillatory features
• K-mouflage at high $k$: extending the reach of $\text{Hi-COLA}$
• Fast Generation of Weak Lensing Maps in Modified Gravity with COLA
• L-PICOLA: A parallel code for fast dark matter simulation