The Cosmological Mass Distribution Function in the Zeldovich Approximation

An analytic approximation to the mass function for gravitationally bound objects is presented. We base on the Zel'dovich approximation to extend the Press-Schechter formalism to a nonspherical dynamical model. A simple extrapolation of that approximation suggests that the gravitational collapse along all three directions which eventually leads to the formation of real virialized objects - clumps occur in the regions where the lowest eigenvalue of the deformation tensor, lambda₃, is positive. We derive the conditional probability of lambda₃>0 as a function of the linearly extrapolated density contrast, delta, and the conditional probability distribution of delta provided that lambda₃>0. These two conditional probability distributions show that the most probable density of the bound regions (lambda₃>0) is roughly 1. 5 at the characteristic mass scale, and that the probability of lambda₃>0 is almost unity in the highly overdense regions (delta>3*sigma). Finally an analytic mass function of clumps is derived with a help of one simple ansatz which is employed to treat the multistream regions beyond the validity of the Zel'dovich approximation. The resulting mass function is renormalized by a factor of 12. 5, which we justify with a sharp k-space filter by means of the modified Jedamzik analysis. Our mass function is shown to be different from the Press-Schechter one, having a lower peak and predicting more small-mass objects.