Field-level emulation of cosmic structure formation with cosmology and redshift dependence

Abstract

We present a field-level emulator for large-scale structure, capturing the cosmology dependence and the time evolution of cosmic structure formation. The emulator maps linear displacement fields to their corresponding nonlinear displacements from N-body simulations at specific redshifts. Designed as a neural network, the emulator incorporates style parameters that encode dependencies on Ωm and the linear growth factor D(z) at redshift z. We train our model on the six-dimensional N-body phase space, predicting particle velocities as the time derivative of the model's displacement outputs. This innovation results in significant improvements in training efficiency and model accuracy. Tested on diverse cosmologies and redshifts not seen during training, the emulator achieves percent-level accuracy on scales of k ∼ 1 Mpc-1h at z = 0, with improved performance at higher redshifts. We compare predicted structure formation histories with N-body simulations via merger trees, finding consistent merger event sequences and statistical properties.