The Cosmological Mass Function in the Zel'dovich Approximation

The Press-Schechter theory of the cosmological mass function and its modifications allow to constraint cosmological scenarios of the structure formation. Recently a few new models have been suggested that explored the influence of anisotropic collapse on the shape of the mass function. I discuss in more detail a particular model that assumes that a fluid particle becomes a part of a gravitationally bound halo when the smallest eigenvalue of the deformation tensor of the filtered initial density field reaches a certain threshold (like the filtered density contrast reaches the threshold in the Press-Schechter formalism). Choosing the smallest eigenvalue guarantees that the fluid particle in question experiences collapse along all three axes. The model shows a better agreement with the N-body simulations than the standard Press-Schechter model.
Talk at 15th Florida Workshop in Nonlinear Astronomy and Physics "The Onset of Nonlinearity", 17-19 February 2000, Gainesville, FL (12 pages, 5 figures)