Statistics of smoothed cosmic fields in perturbation theory I: Formulation and useful formulas in second-order perturbation theory

Takahiko Matsubara

Published 2000-06-20, updated 2002-10-07Version 2

We formulate a general method for perturbative evaluations of statistics of smoothed cosmic fields, and provide useful formulas in application of the perturbation theory to various statistics. This formalism is an extensive generalization of the method used by Matsubara (1994) who derived a weakly nonlinear formula of the genus statistic in a 3D density field. After describing the general method, we apply the formalism to a series of statistics, including genus statistics, level-crossing statistics, Minkowski functionals, and a density extrema statistic, regardless of the dimensions in which each statistic is defined. The relation between the Minkowski functionals and other geometrical statistics is clarified. These statistics can be applied to several cosmic fields, including 3D density field, 3D velocity field, 2D projected density field, and so forth. The results are detailed for second order theory of the formalism. The effect of the bias is discussed. The statistics of smoothed cosmic fields as functions of rescaled threshold by volume-fraction are discussed in the framework of second-order perturbation theory. In CDM-like models, their functional deviations from linear predictions plotted against the rescaled threshold are generally much smaller than that plotted against the direct threshold. There is still slight meat-ball shift against rescaled threshold, which is characterized by asymmetry in depths of troughs in the genus curve. A theory-motivated asymmetry factor in genus curve is proposed.