Nonperturbative collapse models for collisionless self-gravitating flows

Abstract: Structure formation in the Universe has been well-studied within the Eulerian and Lagrangian perturbation theories, where the latter performs substantially better in comparison with N-body simulations. Standing out is the celebrated Zel'dovich approximation for dust matter. In this work, we recall the description of gravitational noncollisional systems and extend both the Eulerian and Lagrangian approaches by including, possibly anisotropic, velocity dispersion. A simple case with plane symmetry is then studied with an exact, nonperturbative approach, and various approximations of the derived model are then compared numerically. A striking result is that linearized Lagrangian solutions outperform models based on Burgers' equation in the multistream regime in comparison with the exact solution. These results are finally extended to a 3D case without symmetries, and master equations for the evolution of all parts of the perturbations are derived. The particular 3D case studied corresponds to a maximally anisotropic collapse, which involves an approximation based on the estimation of importance of the different levels of spatial derivatives of the local deformation field.