EXPLORING NONLINEAR GRAVITATIONAL CLUSTERING PHENOMENA WITH COSMOLOGICAL N-BODY SIMULATIONS

Gravitational clustering is the most fundamental process in the formation of hierarchical structures in the universe. Proper understanding of this process, particularly in highly nonlinear regimes, has progressed very much with a help of numerical simulations. The present paper is intended to review our current understanding of nonlinear clustering phenomena due to the purely gravitational interaction. Particular attention is paid to the most recent results of cosmological N-body simulations. As specific examples of structure formation model, we present detailed predictions of cold dark matter models in order to confront them with the available observational data.