Zel'dovich, Arnol'd and collaborators used caustics and in particular Lagrangian catastrophy theory, the classification of stable caustics, to qualitatively study the formation of the filamentary structure of the cosmic before N-body simulations became feasible. In this project, we have developed a new geometrical proof of Lagrangian catastrophy theory, in terms of both the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the deformation tensor. This new proof allows us to study the role of caustics both qualitatively and quantitatively.

This is work in collaboration with Rien van de Weygaert, Johan Hidding, and Kevin Bixerman.

 

Publications:

J. Feldbrugge, R. van de Weygaert, J. Hidding, J. Feldbrugge Caustic Skeleton and Cosmic Web. 2017. [arXiv][pdf]

J. Feldbrugge, J. Hidding, R. van de Weygaert Statistics of Caustics in Large-Scale Structure Formation. 2014. [arXiv][pdf]

Master thesis advised by Rien van de Weygaert, Diederik Roest and Aernout van Enter [pdf].