Uliana Popov, Katrin Heitmann, James Ahrens, Salman Habib, and Alex Pang
06/22/2011 09:00 AM
Computer Science
This paper describes the analysis and application of visualization techniques to identify, track, and characterize multistreaming events and flows in the evolution of the Universe. Multistreaming is associated with the formation of visually striking large scale structure (LSS) comprised of elements such as halos, filaments, and sheets which have been theoretically predicted and observed in cosmological surveys. Many aspects in LSS theory still remain to be understood; it is therefore of great interest to study the role of multistreaming in the formation and evolution of cosmic structure. This problem is now being attacked with the aid of high accuracy cosmological simulations. In this paper, we describe new methods of identifying multistreaming regions based on various velocity based feature extractors and perform particle and region tracking of multistreaming events. We find that incorporating particle velocity information in the analysis reveals new insights about the evolution of LSS.
