The spherical infall model in a cosmological background density field

We discuss the influence of the cosmological background density field on the spherical infall model. The spherical infall model has been used in the PressSchechter formalism to evaluate the number abundance of clusters of galaxies, as well as to determine the density parameter of the Universe from the infalling flow. Therefore, the understanding of collapse dynamics plays a key role for extracting cosmological information. Here, we consider a modified version of the spherical infall model. We derive the mean field equations from the Newtonian fluid equations, in which the influence of cosmological background inhomogeneity is incorporated into the averaged quantities as the backreaction . By calculating the averaged quantities explicitly, we obtain simple expressions and find that, in the case of a scale-free power spectrum, density fluctuations with a negative spectral index make the infalling velocities slow. This suggests that we underestimate the density parameter when using the simple spherical infall model. In cases with the index n >0, the effect of background inhomogeneity could be negligible and the spherical infall model becomes a good approximation for infalling flows. We also present a realistic example with a cold dark matter power spectrum. In this case, the mean infall tends to be slow owing to the anisotropic random velocity.