Response function of the large-scale structure of the universe to the small scale inhomogeneities

In order to infer the impact of the small-scale physics to the large-scale properties of the universe, we use a series of cosmological N-body simulations of self-gravitating matter inhomogeneities to measure, for the first time, the response function of such a system defined as a functional derivative of the nonlinear power spectrum with respect to its linear counterpart. Its measured shape and amplitude are found to be in good agreement with perturbation theory predictions except for the coupling from small to large-scale perturbations. The latter is found to be significantly damped, following a Lorentzian form. These results shed light on validity regime of perturbation theory calculations giving a useful guideline for regularization of small scale effects in analytical modeling. Most importantly our result indicates that the statistical properties of the large-scale structure of the universe are remarkably insensitive to the details of the small-scale physics, astrophysical or gravitational, paving the way for the derivation of robust estimates of theoretical uncertainties on the determination of cosmological parameters from large-scale survey observations. (C) 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.