Hyperextended cosmological perturbation theory: Predicting nonlinear clustering amplitudes

We consider the long-standing problem of predicting the hierarchical clustering amplitudes S-p in the strongly nonlinear regime of gravitational evolution. N-body results for the nonlinear evolution of the bispectrum (the Fourier transform of the three-point density correlation function) suggest a physically motivated Ansatz that yields the strongly nonlinear behavior of the skewness, S-3, starting from leading-order perturbation theory. When generalized to higher order (p > 3) polyspectra or correlation functions, this Ansatz leads to a good description of nonlinear amplitudes in the strongly nonlinear regime for both scale-free and cold dark matter models. Furthermore, these results allow us to provide a general fitting formula for the nonlinear evolution of the bispectrum that interpolates between the weakly and strongly nonlinear regimes, analogous to previous expressions for the power spectrum.