  The simplest models of dark matter halo formation are based on the heuristic
assumption, motivated by spherical collapse, that virialized haloes originate
from initial regions that are maxima of the smoothed density field. Here, we
replace this notion with the dynamical requirement that protohalo patches be
regions where the local gravitational flow converges to a point. For this
purpose, we look for spheres whose gravitational acceleration at the boundary
-- relative to their center of mass -- points towards their geometric center:
that is, spheres with null dipole moment. We show that these configurations are
minima of the total energy, i.e. the most energetically bound spheres. For this
reason, we study peaks of the energy overdensity field, and argue that the
approach shows considerable promise. This change simply requires that one
modify the standard top-hat filter, with the added important benefit that, for
power spectra of cosmological interest, the resulting model is no longer
plagued by divergences. Although the formalism is no more complicated than the
overdensity based approach, the model is richer in the sense that it naturally
predicts scatter in the overdensities of protohalo patches that are destined to
form haloes of the same mass, in qualitative agreement with simulations of halo
formation.
