Clustering of mass and galaxies

J. A. Peacock

Published 2000-02-01Version 1

These lectures cover various aspects of the statistical description of cosmological density fields. Observationally, this consists of the point process defined by galaxies, and the challenge is to relate this to the continuous density field generated by gravitational instability in dark matter. The main topics discussed are (1) nonlinear structure in CDM models; (2) statistical measures of clustering; (3) redshift-space distortions; (4) small-scale clustering and bias. The overall message is optimistic, in that simple assumptions for where galaxies should form in the mass density field allow one to understand the systematic differences between galaxy data and the predictions of CDM models.