TESTS OF SMOOTHING METHODS FOR TOPOLOGICAL STUDY OF GALAXY REDSHIFT SURVEYS

Studying the topology of large-scale structure as a way to better unde rstand initial conditions has become more widespread in recent years. Studying topology of simulations (which have periodic boundary conditi ons) in redshift space produces results compatible with the real topol ogical characteristics of the simulation. Thus we expect we can extrac t useful information from redshift surveys. However, with nonperiodic boundary conditions, the use of smoothing must result in the loss of i nformation at survey boundaries. In this paper, we test different meth ods of smoothing samples with nonperiodic boundary conditions to see w hich most efficiently preserves the topological features of the real d istribution. We find that a smoothing method which (unlike most previo us published analysis) sums only over cells inside the survey volume p roduces the best results among the schemes tested.