Cosmological N-Body Simulations with a Large-Scale Tidal Field

Abstract

In this paper we carry out anisotropic "separate universe" simulations by including a large-scale tidal field in the N-body code \textsc{gadget}4 using an anisotropic expansion factor $A_{ij}$. We use the code in a pure \textit{particle-mesh} (PM) mode to simulate the evolution of 16 realizations of an initial density field with and without a large-scale tidal field, which are then used to measure the \textit{response function} describing how the tidal field influences structure formation in the linear and non-linear regimes. Together with the previously measured response to a large scale overdensity, this completely describes the nonlinear matter bispectrum in the squeezed limit. We find that, contrary to the density response, the tidal response never significantly exceeds the large-scale perturbation-theory prediction even on nonlinear scales for the redshift range we discuss. We develop a simple halo model that takes into account the effect of the tidal field and compare it with our direct measurement from the anisotropic N-body simulations.