Rotation of Cosmic Voids and Void-Spin Statistics

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of void spins and their correlation properties. The concept of the spin angular momentum for an unbound void is introduced to quantify the effect of the tidal field on the distribution of matter that make up the void. Both the analytical and numerical approaches are used for our study. Analytically, we adopt the linear tidal torque model to evaluate the void spin-spin and spin-density correlations, assuming that a void forms in the initial region where the inertia momentum and the tidal shear tensors are maximally uncorrelated with each other. Numerically, we use the Millennium run galaxy catalog to find voids and calculate their spin statistics. The numerical results turn out to be in excellent agreement with the analytic predictions, both of which consistently show that there are strong spatial alignments between the spin axes of neighbor voids and strong anti-alignments between the void spin axes and the directions to the nearest voids. We expect that our work will provide a deeper insight into the origin and properties of voids and the large scale structure.