MODELS OF LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE

The ingredients required to construct models of the cosmic large scale structure are discussed. Input from particle physics leads to a considerable simplification by offering concrete proposals for the geometry of the universe, the nature of the dark matter and the primordial fluctuations that seed the growth of structure. The remaining ingredient is the physical interaction that governs dynamical evolution. Empirical evidence provided by an analysis of a redshift survey of IRAS galaxies suggests that gravity is the main agent shaping the large-scale structure. In addition, this survey implies large values of the mean cosmic density, OMEGA greater-than-or-similar-to 0.5, and is consistent with a flat geometry if IRAS galaxies are somewhat more clustered than the underlying mass. Together with current limits on the density of baryons from Big Bang nucleosynthesis, this lends support to the idea of a universe dominated by non-baryonic dark matter. Results from cosmological N-body simulations evolved from a variety of initial conditions are reviewed. In particular, neutrino dominated and cold dark matter dominated universes are discussed in detail. Finally, it is shown that apparent periodicities in the redshift distributions in pencil-beam surveys arise frequently from distributions which have no intrinsic periodicity but are clustered on small scales.