Confronting Cold Dark Matter Cosmologies with Strong Clustering of Lyman Break Galaxies at [CLC][ITAL]z[/ITAL][/CLC] ∼ 3

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Abstract
We perform a detailed analysis of the statistical significance of a concentration of Lyman break galaxies at z~3 recently discovered by Steidel et al., using a series of N-body simulations with N=2563 particles in a (100 h-1 Mpc)3 comoving box. While the observed number density of Lyman break galaxies at z~3 implies that they correspond to systems with dark matter halos of 1012 M☉, the resulting clustering of such objects on average is not strong enough to be reconciled with the concentration if it is fairly common; we predict one similar concentration approximately per 6-10 fields in three representative cold dark matter models. Considering the current observational uncertainty of the frequency of such clustering at z~3, it would be premature to rule out the models, but the future spectroscopic surveys in a dozen fields could definitely challenge all the existing cosmological models a posteriori fitted to the z=0 universe.