
Beyond relativistic Lagrangian perturbation theory.
I. An exact-solution controlled model for structure formation
Ismael Delgado Gaspar,1, 2, ∗Thomas Buchert,2, †and Jan J. Ostrowski1, ‡
1Department of Fundamental Research, National Centre for Nuclear Research, Pasteura 7, 02–093 Warsaw, Poland
2Univ Lyon, Ens de Lyon, Univ Lyon1, CNRS, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon UMR5574, F-69007, Lyon, France
We develop a new nonlinear method to model structure formation in general relativity from a
generalization of the relativistic Lagrangian perturbation schemes, controlled by Szekeres (and LTB)
exact solutions. The overall approach can be interpreted as the evolution of a deformation field on
an inhomogeneous reference model, obeying locally Friedmann-like equations. In the special case
of locally one-dimensional deformations, the new model contains the entire Szekeres family of exact
solutions. As thus formulated, this approach paraphrases the Newtonian and relativistic Zel’dovich
approximations, having a large potential for applications in contexts where relativistic degrees of
freedom are relevant. Numerical simulations are implemented to illustrate the capabilities and
accuracy of the model.
I. INTRODUCTION
The problem of cosmological structure formation has
been approached by a variety of methods. The exact,
inhomogeneous solutions of Einstein’s equations provide
valuable hints on relativistic effects, absent in Newtonian
theory, however, their applications remain limited as the
actual cosmic web is much more complex than the scope
covered by the exact solutions. Alternatively, the stan-
dard cosmological perturbation theory can be used in an
attempt to trace the evolution of the density inhomo-
geneities in the linear regime, the obvious limit being the
overdensities or second derivatives of metric perturba-
tions reaching relative values of around unity. These limi-
tations could in principle be overcome with the use of rel-
ativistic numerical simulations (see [1] for a recent com-
parison of performance among the most popular codes
currently being developed). There are, however, several
drawbacks of these numerical methods with a hard to es-
timate influence on the outcomes, e.g., global weak field
assumption, noncovariance of conformal decomposition,
all-time fixed toroidal topology or current computational
capacity limitations, to name a few. In light of recently
revealed, as well as long known but persistent, tensions
haunting modern cosmology, it is very important to im-
prove on the analytical methods providing an essential
counterpart to the numerical efforts. In this spirit, the
so-called silent universe model ([19], [45]) was proposed
and is believed to be able to describe structure formation
in the nonlinear regime, from a wide variety of initial
data, by an exact method. The silent universe model is
based on the specific restriction on the 1 + 3 decomposi-
tion of Einstein’s equations for dust, i.e. the gravitomag-
netic part of the projected Weyl tensor is put to zero.
Unfortunately, this model turned out to be insufficient
to access the nonlinear regime (because of the absence of
∗Ismael.DelgadoGaspar@ncbj.gov.pl
†buchert@ens-lyon.fr
‡Jan.Jakub.Ostrowski@ncbj.gov.pl
rotation and the requirement for the shear to be diagonal-
izable and have two identical eigenvalues) and, although
as desired, it contains several known inhomogeneous ex-
act solutions as subcases, the span of admissible initial
data is very restricted.
In this context, the recent investigation [41] consoli-
dated and generalized an earlier insight by Kasai [60] on
the correspondence between Szekeres class II solutions
and the first-order Lagrangian perturbation solutions in
relativistic cosmology. The relativistic Lagrangian per-
turbation schemes have been developed in the series of
papers [35], [34], [2], [3], [67] and [41]. One aspect of this
generalization is furnished by the result that an extrap-
olated version of the first-order solution scheme, in the
spirit of the original proposal by Zel’dovich in Newtonian
cosmology [92], allows to extend this correspondence to
nonlinear functional expressions of the first-order scheme,
not only for the density but also for the bilinear met-
ric form, the extrinsic and intrinsic curvatures including
their tracefree parts, and other variables. The exact body
of the functionally extrapolated perturbations is obtained
by setting the second and third principal scalar invariants
of the deformation field to zero (for details the reader is
referred to [41]). In the relativistic case, this corresponds
to Szekeres class II solutions, while in the Newtonian
limit this corresponds to a class of 3D solutions without
symmetry obtained in [21] (with empty background), in
[22] for backgrounds with zero cosmological constant and
in [6] including a cosmological constant.
A further insight concerns the way we write the
Szekeres class II solutions: in the so-called Goode-
Wainwright parametrization [48,49] this class can
be written in the form of deviations off a global
FLRW (Friedmann-Lemaˆıtre-Robertson-Walker) back-
ground solution. Looking at the spatial average prop-
erties of the inhomogeneous deviations, we find admis-
sible initial data for deviations that average out on this
background solution. This can be realized, as in Newto-
nian cosmological simulations, by setting periodic bound-
ary conditions on the deviation fields on some scale that
is commonly associated with a ‘scale of homogeneity’.
arXiv:2210.04004v2 [gr-qc] 18 Jan 2023