Phase information and the evolution of cosmological density perturbations

The Fourier transform of cosmological density perturbations can be represented in terms of amplitudes and phases for each Fourier mode. We investigate the phase evolution of these modes using a mixture of analytical and numerical techniques. Using a toy model of one-dimensional perturbations evolving under the Zel'dovich approximation as an initial motivation, we develop a statistic that quantifies the information content of the distribution of phases. Using numerical simulations beginning with more realistic Gaussian random-phase initial conditions, we show that the information content of the phases grows from zero in the initial conditions, first slowly and then rapidly when structures become non-linear. This growth of phase information can be expressed in terms of an effective entropy. Gaussian initial conditions are a maximum entropy realization of the initial power spectrum; gravitational evolution decreases the phase entropy. We show that our definition of phase entropy results in a statistic that explicitly quantifies the information stored in the phases of density perturbations (rather than their amplitudes), and that this statistic displays interesting scaling behaviour for self-similar initial conditions.