Nonlinear Effects due to the Coupling of Long-Wave Modes

The cosmological fluid equations are used to study the nonlinear mode coupling of density fluctuations. We find that for realistic cosmological spectra there is a significant contribution to the nonlinear evolution on scales of interest to large-scale structure from the long-wave part of the initial spectrum. A consequence of this mode coupling is that at high redshift, $z$, the nonlinear scale [defined by $\sigma(z)=1$] can be significantly larger than a linear extrapolation would indicate. For the standard CDM spectrum with a $\sigma_8=1$ normalization the mass corresponding to the nonlinear scale at $z=20, 10, 5$ is about $100, 10, 3$ times (respectively) larger than the linearly extrapolated value. We also investigate the possibility of divergent contributions to the density field from long-wave modes if the spectral index of the power spectrum $\ n<-1$. Using an approximate non-perturbative approach we find that for $n>-3\,$ the divergent contribution appears only in the phase. This can be related to the large-scale bulk velocity, and clarifies previous results from N-body simulations.