Adhesive gravitational clustering

The notion of adhesion has been advanced for the phenomenon of stabilization of large-scale structure emerging from gravitational instability of a cold medium. Recently, the physical origin of adhesion has been identified: a systematic derivation of the equations of motion for the density and the velocity fields leads naturally to the key equation of the “adhesion approximation” – however, under a set of strongly simplifying assumptions. In this work, we provide an evaluation of the current status of adhesive gravitational clustering and a clear explanation of the assumptions involved. Furthermore, we propose systematic generalizations with the aim to relax some of the simplifying assumptions. We start from the general Newtonian evolution equations for self-gravitating particles on an expanding Friedmann background and recover the popular “dust model” (pressureless fluid), which breaks down after the formation of density singularities; then we investigate, in a unified framework, two other models which, under the restrictions referred to above, lead to the “adhesion approximation”. We apply the Eulerian and Lagrangian perturbative expansions to these new models and, finally, we discuss some non-perturbative results that may serve as starting points for workable approximations of non-linear structure formation in the multi-stream regime. In particular, we propose a new approximation that includes, in limiting cases, the standard “adhesion model” and the Eulerian as well as Lagrangian first-order approximations.