In the framework of the gravitational instability
picture, any non-gravitational effect is expected to be relevant only
at quite small scales, where the characteristic time-scale for
gravitational collapse,
, becomes
comparable to the cooling time-scale
. The determination of
is surely less reliable than that of
, since it
relies on the knowledge of cooling mechanisms, local chemical
composition, etc. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that at
scales larger than that of a typical galaxy the dynamics is entirely
determined by the non-dissipative gravitational interaction. At such
scales, the description of the formation of large-scale structures is
obtainable by solving the equations (
) for the evolution of
the density inhomogeneities. However, the difficulty of analytically
following the gravitational evolution when such equations are not
linearizable forces one to resort to numerical
methods. In this context, N-body simulations furnish a fundamental
contribution towards understanding in more detail the nature of
non-linear gravitational dynamics. In fact, N-body codes describe the
evolution of non-linear gravitational clustering by following particle
trajectories under the action of the gravitational force. Initial
conditions (i.e., initial fluctuation and velocity fields) are
fixed in a consistent way at a sufficiently early time, so that linear
theory is a good approximation at all the relevant scales. Then, the
final result of gravitational clustering is compared with the
observational data, in order to assess the reliability of the initial
condition model. It is however clear that, since small scale
virialized structures probably have almost no memory of initial
conditions, structures on larger scales (e.g., filaments or
voids) are much more useful in giving constraints about the nature of
the primordial fluctuations.
A basic parameter which measures the capability of N-body codes to faithfully represent gravitational clustering is the width of their dynamical range for mass and length resolution. Mass resolution is fixed by the total number of particles employed. Since a given mass is assigned to each particle, we should require at the linear stage that fluctuations on a mass scale below that of a particle were negligible. The dynamical range for length resolution is fixed by the ratio of the size of the simulation box to the softening scale for the computation of the gravitational force. Very detailed tests are always required to measure the resolution of numerical codes, in order to be sure about the reliability of the subsequent clustering representation.
Because of the limits imposed by computational costs and computer memory, different strategies can be adopted in order to compromise between between numerical resource and extension of the dynamical range. Accordingly, three main categories of N-body simulations can be devised, which essentially differ in their prescriptions for evaluating the gravitational force between particles.
For further technical details about N-body codes we refer to the standard textbook by Hockney & Eastwood [16], while we refer to the web-page of the Virgo consortium [19] for a description of the status-of-art cosmological simulations, ranging over a wide scale range.