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A detailed view of filaments and sheets in the warm-hot intergalactic medium. I. Pancake formation

Numerical simulations predict a considerable fraction of the missing baryons at redshift z ~ 0 resting in the so called warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). The filaments and sheets of the WHIM have high temperatures 10^5 - 10^7 K) and a high degree of ionization while having only low to intermediate densities. The particular physical conditions of the WHIM structures, e.g. density and temperature profiles, velocity fields, are expected to leave their special imprint on spectroscopic observations. In order to get further insight into these conditions, we perform hydrodynamical simulations of the WHIM. Instead of analyzing large simulations of cosmological structure formation, we simulate particular well-defined structures and study the impact of different physical processes as well as of the scale dependencies. We start with the comprehensive study of the one-dimensional collapse (pancake) and examine the influence of radiative cooling, heating due to an UV background, and thermal conduction. We investigate the effect of small scale perturbations given according to the initial cosmological power spectrum. If the initial perturbation length scale L exceeds ~ 2 Mpc the collapse leads to shock confined structures. As a result of radiative cooling and of heating due to an UV background a relatively cold and dense core forms in the one-dimensional case. The properties of the core (extension, density, and temperature) are correlated with L. For larger L the core sizes are more concentrated. Thermal conduction enhances this trend and may even result in an evaporation of the core. Our estimates predict that a core may start to evaporate for perturbation lengths larger than L ~ 30 Mpc. The obtained detailed profiles for density and temperature for prototype WHIM structures allow for the determination of possible spectral signatures by the WHIM.