The Robustness of Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulation Predictions to Changes in Numerics and Cooling Physics

Abstract

We test and improve the numerical schemes in our smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code for cosmological simulations, including the pressure-entropy formulation (PESPH), a time-dependent artificial viscosity, a refined timestep criterion, and metal-line cooling that accounts for photoionisation in the presence of a recently refined Haardt \& Madau (2012) model of the ionising background. The PESPH algorithm effectively removes the artificial surface tension present in the traditional SPH formulation, and in our test simulations it produces better qualitative agreement with mesh-code results for Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and cold cloud disruption. Using a set of cosmological simulations, we examine many of the quantities we have studied in previous work. Results for galaxy stellar and HI mass functions, star formation histories, galaxy scaling relations, and statistics of the Ly$\alpha$ forest are robust to the changes in numerics and microphysics. As in our previous simulations, cold gas accretion dominates the growth of high-redshift galaxies and of low mass galaxies at low redshift, and recycling of winds dominates the growth of massive galaxies at low redshift. However, the PESPH simulation removes spurious cold clumps seen in our earlier simulations, and the accretion rate of hot gas increases by up to an order of magnitude at some redshifts. The new numerical model also influences the distribution of metals among gas phases, leading to considerable differences in the statistics of some metal absorption lines, most notably NeVIII.

arXiv comment29 pages, 25 figures, accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (92)

• Galactic Stellar and Substellar Initial Mass Function
• Planck 2013 results. XVI. Cosmological parameters
• The cosmological simulation code GADGET-2
• The Global Schmidt Law in Star Forming Galaxies
• The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments
• E pur si muove: Galiliean-invariant cosmological hydrodynamical simulations on a moving mesh
• How Do Galaxies Get Their Gas?
• Introducing the Illustris Project: Simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe
• Cosmological Hydrodynamics with Adaptive Mesh Refinement: a new high resolution code called RAMSES
• Collisional Plasma Models with APEC/APED: Emission Line Diagnostics of Hydrogen-like and Helium-like Ions
• The Star Formation Efficiency in Nearby Galaxies: Measuring Where Gas Forms Stars Effectively
• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Data Processing, Sky Maps, and Basic Results
• Galaxies on FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments): Stellar Feedback Explains Cosmologically Inefficient Star Formation
• Galactic star formation and accretion histories from matching galaxies to dark matter haloes
• Radiative transfer in a clumpy universe: IV. New synthesis models of the cosmic UV/X-ray background
• GIZMO: A New Class of Accurate, Mesh-Free Hydrodynamic Simulation Methods
• FIRE-2 Simulations: Physics versus Numerics in Galaxy Formation
• On the Maximum Luminosity of Galaxies and Their Central Black Holes: Feedback From Momentum-Driven Winds
• Cosmological Simulations with TreeSPH
• The effect of photo-ionization on the cooling rates of enriched, astrophysical plasmas
• Cosmological SPH simulations: The entropy equation
• Enzo: An Adaptive Mesh Refinement Code for Astrophysics
• Baryons in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium
• Galaxies in a simulated $\Lambda$CDM Universe I: cold mode and hot cores
• SPLASH: An interactive visualisation tool for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations
• Improving convergence in smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations without pairing instability
• Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics
• The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: The alpha.40 HI Source Catalog, its Characteristics and their Impact on the Derivation of the HI Mass Function
• Cosmological Simulations of Intergalactic Medium Enrichment from Galactic Outflows
• Fundamental differences between SPH and grid methods
• Forming Disk Galaxies in Lambda CDM Simulations
• Stellar Feedback in Galaxies and the Origin of Galaxy-scale Winds
• The history of star formation in a LCDM universe
• Outflows in Infrared-Luminous Starbursts at z < 0.5. II. Analysis and Discussion
• Mass, Metal, and Energy Feedback in Cosmological Simulations
• Forming Realistic Late-Type Spirals in a LCDM Universe: The Eris Simulation
• The Origin of the Galaxy Mass-Metallicity Relation and Implications for Galactic Outflows
• The Santa Barbara cluster comparison project: a comparison of cosmological hydrodynamics solutions
• Feedback and Recycled Wind Accretion: Assembling the z=0 Galaxy Mass Function
• The Disruption of Giant Molecular Clouds by Radiation Pressure and the Efficiency of Star Formation in Galaxies
• Simulating galactic outflows with kinetic supernova feedback
• An investigation of cooling flows and general cluster properties from an X-ray image deprojection analysis of 207 clusters of galaxies
• The Aquila comparison Project: The Effects of Feedback and Numerical Methods on Simulations of Galaxy Formation
• The Lyman-alpha Forest in the Cold Dark Matter Model
• Galaxy Evolution in Cosmological Simulations with Outflows II: Metallicities and Gas Fractions
• A General Class of Lagrangian Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Methods and Implications for Fluid Mixing Problems
• Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics in Astrophysics
• Modelling discontinuities and Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities in SPH
• Moving mesh cosmology: tracing cosmological gas accretion
• Galaxy Evolution in Cosmological Simulations With Outflows I: Stellar Masses and Star Formation Rates
• MUFASA: Galaxy Formation Simulations With Meshless Hydrodynamics
• Inviscid SPH
• Semi-analytic predictions for statistical properties of X-ray clusters of galaxies in cold dark matter universes
• The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: the importance of the hydrodynamics scheme
• Galaxies in a Simulated $\Lambda$CDM Universe II: Observable Properties and Constraints on Feedback
• The Lx-T, Lx-sigma and sigma-T relations for groups and clusters of galaxies
• Moving mesh cosmology: numerical techniques and global statistics
• A Necessary Condition for Individual Time-Steps in SPH Simulations
• The Neutral Hydrogen Content of Galaxies in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations
• Implementation of feedback in SPH: towards concordance of methods
• An HST/COS Survey of the Low-Redshift IGM. I. Survey, Methodology, & Overall Results
• A Density Independent Formulation of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics
• Tracing Inflows and Outflows with Absorption Lines in Circumgalactic Gas
• Resolving mixing in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics
• Moving mesh cosmology: the hydrodynamics of galaxy formation
• SPHS: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics with a higher order dissipation switch
• SPHGal: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics with improved accuracy for Galaxy simulations
• The intergalactic medium over the last 10 billion years I: Lyman alpha absorption and physical conditions
• Moving mesh cosmology: characteristics of galaxies and haloes
• The Nature and Origin of Low-Redshift O VI Absorbers
• The intergalactic medium over the last 10 billion years II: Metal-line absorption and physical conditions
• Moving Mesh Cosmology: Properties of Gas Disks
• Hydrogen and Metal Line Absorption Around Low-Redshift Galaxies in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations
• Voigt-Profile Analysis of the Lyman-alpha Forest in a Cold Dark Matter Universe
• Modelling the uv/x-ray cosmic background with CUBA
• The Physical and Photometric Properties of High-Redshift Galaxies in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations
• The Photon Underproduction Crisis
• The multiphase circumgalactic medium traced by low metal ions in EAGLE zoom simulations
• nIFTy galaxy cluster simulations I: dark matter & non-radiative models
• The Statistical and Physical Properties of the Low Redshift Lyman Alpha Forest Observed with HST/STIS
• Baryon Cycling in the Low-Redshift Circumgalactic Medium: A Comparison of Simulations to the COS-Halos Survey
• Enrichment and Pre-Heating in Intragroup Gas from Galactic Outflows
• rpSPH: a novel Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Algorithm
• Pressure Support vs. Thermal Broadening in the Lyman-alpha Forest I: Effects of the Equation of State on Longitudinal Structure
• nIFTy galaxy cluster simulations II: radiative models
• Lyman Break Galaxies and the Lyman-alpha Forest
• Hydrodynamic simulations with the Godunov SPH
• The Growth and Enrichment of the Intragroup Gas
• EvoL: The new Padova T-SPH parallel code for cosmological simulations - I. Basic code: gravity and hydrodynamics
• Pressure Support vs. Thermal Broadening in the Lyman-alpha Forest II: Effects of the Equation of State on Transverse Structure
• The formation of entropy cores in non-radiative galaxy cluster simulations: SPH versus AMR
• Self-cancellation of ephemeral regions in the quiet Sun

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Simulating cosmic structure formation with the GADGET-4 code
• The Three Hundred Project: correcting for the hydrostatic-equilibrium mass bias in X-ray and SZ surveys
• Thermal Instability in the CGM of $L_{\star }$ Galaxies: Testing "Precipitation" Models with the FIRE Simulations
• HALOGAS: Strong Constraints on the Neutral Gas Reservoir and Accretion Rate in Nearby Spiral Galaxies
• ELUCID VII: Using Constrained Hydro Simulations to Explore the Gas Component of the Cosmic Web
• Possible origins of anomalous HI gas around MHONGOOSE galaxy, NGC 5068
• The Impact of Wind Scalings on Stellar Growth and the Baryon Cycle in Cosmological Simulations
• Imprints of the cosmic void evolution on the baryon processes inside galaxy haloes
• Anomalous gas in ESO 149-G003: A MeerKAT-16 View
• Multi-Epoch Machine Learning 2: Identifying physical drivers of galaxy properties in simulations
• A New Model For Including Galactic Winds in Simulations of Galaxy Formation II: Implementation of PhEW in Cosmological Simulations