Large-scale structures of the Universe: physics, phenomenology, statistics
Cora Uhlemann
astro-ph.CO
Submitted: 2026-06-26
Comments: Lectures given at the Les Houches Summer School "The Dark Universe" July-August 2025. 44 pages (excluding references) and 19 figures. Prepared for submission to SciPost Physics Lecture Notes
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: In this series of lectures, we seek to describe the evolution of the cosmic large-scale structure.
Terminology
Abstract
In this series of lectures, we seek to describe the evolution of the cosmic large-scale structure. We will discover the cosmic web - the large-scale skeleton of matter traced by galaxies. It arises from the interplay of the gravitational pull of dark matter and the expansion driven by dark energy. Major large-scale galaxy surveys map the distribution of matter and galaxies across most of the sky, spanning over 10 billion years of cosmic history. I will guide you through some of the principles and challenges behind predicting the statistical properties of the matter and galaxy distribution in vast cosmic volumes. In particular we discuss the underlying nonlinear physics and resulting non-Gaussian statistics that need to be predicted to extract fundamental physics from observational data.
Sources
- Large-Scale Galaxy Bias
- Cosmological Non-Linearities as an Effective Fluid
- Euclid. V. The Flagship galaxy mock catalogue: a comprehensive simulation for the Euclid mission
- Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Photometric Data Set for Cosmology
- Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
- Euclid. I. Overview of the Euclid mission
- Geometry and Morphology of the Cosmic Web: Analyzing Spatial Patterns in the Universe
- Tessellating the cosmological dark-matter sheet: origami creases in the universe and ways to find them
- KiDS-Legacy: Cosmological constraints from cosmic shear with the complete Kilo-Degree Survey
- On the connectivity of the cosmic web: theory and implications for cosmology and galaxy formation
- Earth-mass haloes and the emergence of NFW density profiles
- A Short Introduction to Cosmology and its Current Status
- PKDGRAV3: Beyond Trillion Particle Cosmological Simulations for the Next Era of Galaxy Surveys
- Dark Sky Simulations: Early Data Release
- The Cosmic Web, Multi-Stream Flows, and Tessellations
- ColDICE: a parallel Vlasov-Poisson solver using moving adaptive simplicial tessellation
- An adaptively refined phase-space element method for cosmological simulations and collisionless dynamics
- Tracing the Dark Matter Sheet in Phase Space
- Schr\"odinger method as N-body double and UV completion of dust
- On the Schrodinger-Poisson--Vlasov-Poisson correspondence
Related papers
- Angular clustering and bias of photometric quasars in the Kilo-Degree Survey Data Release 4
- A Novel kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Estimator for Electron-Electron Correlations
- Magnetic fields at the dawn of structure formation I. The CARLA J1510+5958 proto-cluster
- Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Weak Lensing and Galaxy Clustering Cosmological Analysis Framework
- Exploring the Impact of Systematic Bias in Type Ia Supernova Cosmology Across Diverse Dark Energy Parametrizations
- Non-Gaussian Galaxy Stochasticity and the Noise-Field Formulation