Supercluster Properties as a Cosmological Probe

We investigate the supercluster shape properties of the all-sky observed (Abell/ACO) and simulated (Virgo data) cluster catalogues using an approach based on differential geometry. We reliably identify rich superclusters by applying percolation statistics to both observed and mock cluster populations, the latter being constructed following the observational requirements of the Abell/ACO sample extended out to $z_{\rm max}\leq 0.114$. We apply a set of shape diagnostics in order to study in a thorough way the morphological features of superclusters with $\geq 8$ cluster members. Results demonstrate that filamentarity is the dominant shape feature of superclusters. On comparing data and models, we show that the $\Lambda$CDM ($\Omega_{\Lambda}=1-\Omega_{\rm m}=0.7$) model performs better than $\tau$CDM, which is excluded at a high confidence level, in agreement with other recent large scale structure studies.