Distributions of Baryon Fraction on Large Scales in the Universe

(Abridged) The nonlinear evolution of the system consisting of baryons and dark matter is generally characterized by strong shocks and discontinuities. The velocity of baryons will be significantly slowing down at post-shock areas of gravitational strong shocks, which can occur in high overdense as well as low overdense regions. Consequently, the baryon fraction would be non-uniform on large scales. With simulation samples produced by the WENO hybrid cosmological hydrodynamic/N-body code, we find that the baryon fraction in high-density regions averagely is lower than the cosmic baryon fraction, and many baryons accumulate in the regions with moderate mass density to form a high baryon fraction phase (HBFP) of baryons. In dense regions with \rho/\bar{\rho}>100 (the possible hosts for galaxy clusters), the baryon fraction can be lower than the cosmic baryon fraction by about 10-20% at z ~ 0. Our simulation samples show that about 3% of the cosmic baryon budget was hidden in the HBFP at redshift z = 3, while this percentage increases to about 14% at the present day. The gas in the HBFP cannot be detected either by Ly-alpha forests of QSO's absorption spectrum or by soft X-ray background. That is, the HBFP would be missed in the baryon budget given by current observations