Modelling the environmental dependence of the growth rate
  The growth rate of cosmic structure is a powerful cosmological probe for
extracting information on the gravitational interactions and dark energy. In
the late time Universe, the growth rate becomes non-linear and is usually
probed by measuring the two point statistics of galaxy clustering in redshift
space up to a limited scale, retaining the constraint on the linear growth rate
f. In this letter, we present an alternative method to analyse the growth of
structure in terms of local densities, i.e. f(Delta). Using N-body simulations,
we measure the function of f(Delta) and show that structure grows faster in
high density regions and slower in low density regions. We demonstrate that
f(Delta) can be modelled using a log-normal Monte Carlo Random Walk approach,
which provides a means to extract cosmological information from f(Delta). We
discuss prospects for applying this approach to galaxy surveys.
