Molecular hydrogen regulated star formation in cosmological SPH simulations

Abstract

It has been shown observationally that star formation (SF) correlates tightly with the presence of molecular hydrogen (H${}_2$). Therefore it would be important to investigate its implication on galaxy formation in a cosmological context. In the present work, we track the H${}_2$ mass fraction within our cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code GADGET-3 using an equilibrium analytic model by Krumholz et al. This model allows us to regulate the star formation in our simulation by the local abundance of H${}_2$ rather than the total cold gas density, and naturally introduce the dependence of star formation on metallicity. We investigate implications of the equilibrium H${}_2$-based SF model on galaxy population properties, such as the stellar-to-halo mass ratio (SHMR), baryon fraction, cosmic star formation rate density (SFRD), galaxy specific SFR, galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMF), and Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) relationship. The advantage of our work over the previous ones is having a large sample of simulated galaxies in a cosmological volume from high-redshift to $z=0$. We find that low-mass halos with M${}_{DM}<10^{10.5}$ M${}_{\odot }$ are less efficient in producing stars in the H${}_2$-based SF model at $z\ge 6$, which brings the simulations to a better agreement with observational estimates of SHMR and GSMF at the low-mass end. This is particularly evident by a reduction in the number of low-mass galaxies at M${}_{\star }\le 10^8$ M${}_{\odot }$ in the GSMF. The overall SFRD is also reduced at high-$z$ in the H${}_2$ run, which results in slightly higher SFRD at low-redshift due to more abundant gas available for star formation at later times. This new H${}_2$ model is able to reproduce the empirical KS relationship at $z=0$ naturally without the need for setting its normalization by hand, and overall it seems to have more advantages than the previous pressure-based SF model.

23 pages, 19 figures, 1 table, accepted to ApJ

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