EPoS Contribution
EPoS Contribution
A Theoretical Approach to the Principal Component Analysis of Molecular Clouds

Yi Liu
PMO, CAS, Nanjing, CN
The application of Principal Component Analysis(PCA) has been proposed for the analysis of molecular clouds. Various of numerical studies have shown that the slope of the pseudo-structure function is highly correlated with the velocity power spectrum and can only be marginally effected by opacity, chemical inhomogeneity and radiative transfer. But this relation is empirical and only one theoretical work was presented to try to provide an explanation. In this talk, I will report a further theoretical study which use a more realistic basis function to describe the engenvector and finally show a clear relation between the slope of the pseudo-structure function and the velocity power spectrum.
Caption: Example of the psedu-structure function of Maddalena cloud. The black squares are the results from PCA, and the red ones are from our analytical engenvectors. We can see that they have same behavior and shear almost identical slop. This means that our analytical basis function is a good replacement for the numerically solved PCs.
Suggested Session: Molecular Clouds