Detection of Network Structure in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey

We employ a percolation technique developed for pointwise distributions toanalyze two-dimensional projections of the three northern and three southernslices in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey. One of the goals of this paper isto compare the visual impressions of the structure within distributions withobjective statistical analysis. We track the growth of the largest cluster asan indicator of the network structure. We restrict our analysis to volumelimited subsamples in the regions from 200 to 400 Mpc/h where the numberdensity of galaxies is the highest. As a major result, we report a measurementof an unambiguous signal, with high signal-to-noise ratio (at least at thelevel of a few $\sigma$), indicating significant connectivity of the galaxydistribution which in two dimensions is indicative of a filamentarydistribution. This is in general agreement with the visual impression andtypical for the standard theory of the large-scale structure formation based ongravitational instability of initially Gaussian density fluctuations.Comment: The main body of the text (17 pages) is followed by the captions file plus 4 postscript figures. Submitted to Ap