Detection of network structure in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey

We employ a percolation technique developed for pointwise distributions to analyze two-dimensional projections of the three northern and three southern slices in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey. One of the goals of this paper is to compare the visual impressions of the structure within distributions with objective statistical analysis. We track the growth of the largest cluster as an indicator of the network structure. We restrict our analysis to volume-limited subsamples in the regions from 200 to 400 h(-1) Mpc, where the number density of galaxies is the highest. As a major result, we report a measurement of an unambiguous signal with a high signal-to-noise ratio (at least at the level of a few sigma sigma), indicating significant connectivity of the galaxy distribution which in two dimensions is indicative of a filamentary distribution. This is in general agreement with the visual impression and typical for the standard theory of the large-scale structure formation based on gravitational instability of initially Gaussian density fluctuations.