Renyi entropy as a measure of cosmic homogeneity

Abstract

We propose a method for testing homogeneity in three dimensional spatial distributions using Renyi entropy. We apply the proposed method to data from cosmological N-body simulations and Monte Carlo simulations of homogeneous Poisson point process. We show that the method can effectively characterize the inhomogeneities and identify any transition scale to homogeneity, if present in such distributions. The proposed method can be used to study the cosmic homogeneity in present and future generation galaxy redshift surveys.