Spawning and merging of Fourier modes and phase coupling in cosmological density bispectrum

In the standard picture of cosmological structure formation, initially random-phase fluctuations are amplified by non-linear gravitational instability to produce a final distribution of mass which is highly non-Gaussian and has highly-coupled Fourier phases. We use the Zel’dovich approximation in one dimension to elucidate the onset of non-linearity including mode spawning, merging and coupling. We show that as gravitational clustering proceeds, Fourier modes are spawned from parent ones, with their phases following a harmonic relationship with the wavenumbers. Spawned modes could also merge leading to modulation of the amplitudes and phases which consequently breaks such harmonic relation. We also use simple toy models to demonstrate that bispectrum, Fourier transform of connected three-point correlation functions, measures phase coupling at most at the second-order only when the special wavenumber-phase harmonic relation holds. Phase information is therefore partly registered in bispectrum and it takes a complete hierarchy of polyspectra to fully characterize gravitational non-linearity.