Nonlinear growth of structure in cosmologies with damped matter
  fluctuations
  We investigate the nonlinear evolution of structure in variants of the
standard cosmological model which display damped density fluctuations relative
to cold dark matter (e.g. in which cold dark matter is replaced by warm or
interacting DM). Using N-body simulations, we address the question of how much
information is retained from different scales in the initial linear power
spectrum following the nonlinear growth of structure. We run a suite of N-body
simulations with different initial linear matter power spectra to show that,
once the system undergoes nonlinear evolution, the shape of the linear power
spectrum at high wavenumbers does not affect the non-linear power spectrum,
while it still matters for the halo mass function. Indeed, we find that linear
power spectra which differ from one another only at wavenumbers larger than
their half-mode wavenumber give rise to (almost) identical nonlinear power
spectra at late times, regardless of the fact that they originate from
different models with damped fluctuations. On the other hand, the halo mass
function is more sensitive to the form of the linear power spectrum. Exploiting
this result, we propose a two parameter model of the transfer function in
generic damped scenarios, and show that this parametrisation works as well as
the standard three parameter models for the scales on which the linear spectrum
is relevant.
