The adhesion model as a field theory for cosmological clustering

Abstract

The adhesion model has been proposed in the past as an improvement of the Zel'dovich approximation, providing a good description of the formation of the cosmic web. We recast the model as a field theory for cosmological large scale structure, adding a stochastic force to account for power generated from very short, highly non-linear scales that is uncorrelated with the initial power spectrum. The dynamics of this Stochastic Adhesion Model (SAM) is reminiscent of the well known Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation with the difference that the viscosity and the noise spectrum are time dependent. Choosing the viscosity proportional to the growth factor $D$ restricts the form of noise spectrum through a 1-loop renormalization argument. For this choice, the SAM field theory is renormalizable to one loop. We comment on the suitability of this model for describing the non-linear regime of the CDM power spectrum and its utility as a relatively simple approach to cosmological clustering.