The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. A theoretically interesting and practically important question in cosmology is the reconstruction of the initial density distribution provided a late-time density field. This is a long-standing question with a revived interest recently, especially in the context of optimally extracting the baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) signals from observed galaxy distributions. We present a new efficient method to carry out this reconstruction, which is based on numerical solutions to the nonlinear partial differential equation that governs the mapping between the initial Lagrangian and final Eulerian coordinates of particles in evolved density fields. This is motivated by numerical simulations of the quartic Galileon gravity model, which has similar equations that can be solved effectively by multigrid Gauss-Seidel relaxation. The method is based on mass conservation, and does not assume any specific cosmological model. Our test shows that it has a performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art algorithms that were very recently put forward in the literature, with the reconstructed density field over ∼80% (50%) correlated with the initial condition at k ≲ 0.6 h=Mpc (1.0 h=Mpc). With an example, we demonstrate that this method can significantly improve the accuracy of BAO reconstruction.

The reconstruction of the initial conditions of the Universe is an important topic in cosmology, particularly in the context of sharpening the measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) peak. Nonlinear reconstruction algorithms developed in recent years, when applied to late-time matter fields, can recover to a substantial degree the initial density distribution, however, when applied to sparse tracers of the matter field, the performance is poorer. In this paper we apply the Shi et al. non-linear reconstruction method to biased tracers in order to establish what factors affect the reconstruction performance. We find that grid resolution, tracer number density and mass assignment scheme all have a significant impact on the performance of our reconstruction method, with triangular-shaped-cloud (TSC) mass assignment and a grid resolution of ∼1−2h −1 Mpc being the optimal choice. We also show that our method can be easily adapted to include generic tracer biases up to quadratic order in the reconstruction formalism. Applying the reconstruction to halo and galaxy samples with a range of tracer number densities, we find that the linear bias is by far the most important bias term, while including nonlocal and nonlinear biases only leads to marginal improvements on the reconstruction performance. Overall, including bias in the reconstruction substantially improves the recovery of BAO wiggles, down to k ∼ 0.25 hMpc −1 for tracer number densities between 2 × 10 −4 and 2 × 10 −3 (h −1 Mpc) −3 .

Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) could form via runaway merging of massive stars in a young massive star cluster (YMC). We combine a suite of numerical simulations of YMC formation with a semi-analytic model for dynamical friction and merging of massive stars and evolution of a central quasi-star, to predict how final quasi-star and relic IMBH masses scale with cluster properties (and compare with observations). The simulations argue that inner YMC density profiles at formation are steep (approaching isothermal), producing some efficient merging even in clusters with relatively low effective densities, unlike models which assume flat central profiles resembling those of globular clusters (GCs) after central relaxation. Our results can be approximated by simple analytic scalings, with $M_{\rm IMBH} \propto v_{\rm cl}^{3/2}$ where $v_{\rm cl}^{2} = G\, M_{\rm cl}/r_{\rm h}$ is the circular velocity in terms of initial cluster mass Mcl and half-mass radius rh. While this suggests IMBH formation is possible even in typical clusters, we show that predicted IMBH masses for these systems are small, ∼100 − 1000 M⊙ or ∼0.0003 Mcl, below even the most conservative observational upper limits in all known cases. The IMBH mass could reach ≳ 104 M⊙ in the centers nuclear star clusters, ultra-compact dwarfs, or compact ellipticals, but in all these cases the prediction remains far below the present observed supermassive BH masses in these systems.