A QUANTITATIVE MEASURE OF PHASE CORRELATIONS IN DENSITY FIELDS

We present a quantitative measure of the phase correlations in a density field based on the location of the maxima of the Fourier components of that field. We find that our measure can easily detect non-Gaussian behavior either in artificially constructed density fields or those that become non-Gaussian from gravitational clustering of Gaussian initial conditions. We find that different initial power spectra produce somewhat distinguishable signals, and the signals are robust against sparse sampling.