(DarkAI) Mapping the large-scale density field of dark matter using artificial intelligence

Herein, we present a deep-learning technique for reconstructing the dark-matter density field from the redshift-space distribution of dark-matter halos. We built a UNet-architecture neural network and trained it using the COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration fast simulation, which is an approximation of the N-body simulation with 5123 particles in a box size of 500 h-1Mpc. Further, we tested the resulting UNet model not only with training-like test samples but also with standard N-body simulations, such as the Jiutian simulation with 61443 particles in a box size of 1000 h-1Mpc and the ELUCID simulation, which has a different cosmology. The real-space dark-matter density fields in the three simulations can be reconstructed reliably with only a small reduction of the cross-correlation power spectrum at 1% and 10% levels at k = 0.1 and 0.3 h Mpc-1, respectively. The reconstruction clearly helps to correct for redshift-space distortions and is unaffected by the different cosmologies between the training (Planck2018) and test samples (WMAP5). Furthermore, we tested the application of the UNet-reconstructed density field to obtain the velocity & tidal field and found that this approach provides better results compared with the traditional approach based on the linear bias model, showing a 12.2% improvement in the correlation slope and a 21.1% reduction in the scatter between the predicted and true velocities. Thus, our method is highly efficient and has excellent extrapolation reliability beyond the training set. This provides an ideal solution for determining the three-dimensional underlying density field from the plentiful galaxy survey data.