No Arabic abstract
Cosmological shocks are a critical part of large-scale structure formation, and are responsible for heating the intracluster medium in galaxy clusters. In addition, they are also capable of accelerating non-thermal electrons and protons. In this work, we focus on the acceleration of electrons at shock fronts, which is thought to be responsible for radio relics - extended radio features in the vicinity of merging galaxy clusters. By combining high resolution AMR/N-body cosmological simulations with an accurate shock finding algorithm and a model for electron acceleration, we calculate the expected synchrotron emission resulting from cosmological structure formation. We produce synthetic radio maps of a large sample of galaxy clusters and present luminosity functions and scaling relationships. With upcoming long wavelength radio telescopes, we expect to see an abundance of radio emission associated with merger shocks in the intracluster medium. By producing observationally motivated statistics, we provide predictions that can be compared with observations to further improve our understanding of magnetic fields and electron shock acceleration.
We have explored the evolution of gas distributions from cosmological simulations carried out using the RAMSES adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code, to explore the effects of resolution on cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. It is vital to understand the effect of both the resolution of initial conditions and the final resolution of the simulation. Lower initial resolution simulations tend to produce smaller numbers of low mass structures. This will strongly affect the assembly history of objects, and has the same effect of simulating different cosmologies. The resolution of initial conditions is an important factor in simulations, even with a fixed maximum spatial resolution. The power spectrum of gas in simulations using AMR diverges strongly from the fixed grid approach - with more power on small scales in the AMR simulations - even at fixed physical resolution and also produces offsets in the star formation at specific epochs. This is because before certain times the upper grid levels are held back to maintain approximately fixed physical resolution, and to mimic the natural evolution of dark matter only simulations. Although the impact of hold back falls with increasing spatial and initial-condition resolutions, the offsets in the star formation remain down to a spatial resolution of 1 kpc. These offsets are of order of 10-20%, which is below the uncertainty in the implemented physics but are expected to affect the detailed properties of galaxies. We have implemented a new grid-hold-back approach to minimize the impact of hold back on the star formation rate.
A numerical code for solving various Lyman alpha (Lya) radiative transfer (RT) problems is presented. The code is suitable for an arbitrary, three-dimensional distribution of Lya emissivity, gas temperature, density, and velocity field. Capable of handling Lya RT in an adaptively refined grid-based structure, it enables detailed investigation of the effects of clumpiness of the interstellar (or intergalactic) medium. The code is tested against various geometrically and physically idealized configurations for which analytical solutions exist, and subsequently applied to three Lyman-break galaxies, extracted from high-resolution cosmological simulations at redshift z = 3.6. Proper treatment of the Lya scattering reveals a diversity of surface brightness (SB) and line profiles. Specifically, for a given galaxy the maximum observed SB can vary by an order of magnitude, and the total flux by a factor of 3 - 6, depending on the viewing angle. This may provide an explanation for differences in observed properties of high-redshift galaxies, and in particular a possible physical link between Lyman-break galaxies and regular Lya emitters.
We present new results characterizing cosmological shocks within adaptive mesh refinement N-Body/hydrodynamic simulations that are used to predict non-thermal components of large-scale structure. This represents the first study of shocks using adaptive mesh refinement. We propose a modified algorithm for finding shocks from those used on unigrid simulations that reduces the shock frequency of low Mach number shocks by a factor of ~3. We then apply our new technique to a large, (512 Mpc/h)^3, cosmological volume and study the shock Mach number (M) distribution as a function of pre-shock temperature, density, and redshift. Because of the large volume of the simulation, we have superb statistics that results from having thousands of galaxy clusters. We find that the Mach number evolution can be interpreted as a method to visualize large-scale structure formation. Shocks with Mach<5 typically trace mergers and complex flows, while 5<Mach<20 and Mach>20 generally follow accretion onto filaments and galaxy clusters, respectively. By applying results from nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration models using the first-order Fermi process, we calculate the amount of kinetic energy that is converted into cosmic ray protons. The acceleration of cosmic ray protons is large enough that in order to use galaxy clusters as cosmological probes, the dynamic response of the gas to the cosmic rays must be included in future numerical simulations.
To date, fully cosmological hydrodynamic disk simulations to redshift zero have only been undertaken with particle-based codes, such as GADGET, Gasoline, or GCD+. In light of the (supposed) limitations of traditional implementations of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), or at the very least, their respective idiosyncrasies, it is important to explore complementary approaches to the SPH paradigm to galaxy formation. We present the first high-resolution cosmological disk simulations to redshift zero using an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR)-based hydrodynamical code, in this case, RAMSES. We analyse the temporal and spatial evolution of the simulated stellar disks vertical heating, velocity ellipsoids, stellar populations, vertical and radial abundance gradients (gas and stars), assembly/infall histories, warps/lopsideness, disk edges/truncations (gas and stars), ISM physics implementations, and compare and contrast these properties with our sample of cosmological SPH disks, generated with GCD+. These preliminary results are the first in our long-term Galactic Archaeology Simulation program.
A computer code is described for the simulation of gravitational lensing data. The code incorporates adaptive mesh refinement in choosing which rays to shoot based on the requirements of the source size, location and surface brightness distribution or to find critical curves/caustics. A variety of source surface brightness models are implemented to represent galaxies and quasar emission regions. The lensing mass can be represented by point masses (stars), smoothed simulation particles, analytic halo models, pixelized mass maps or any combination of these. The deflection and beam distortions (convergence and shear) are calculated by modified tree algorithm when halos, point masses or particles are used and by FFT when mass maps are used. The combination of these methods allow for a very large dynamical range to be represented in a single simulation. Individual images of galaxies can be represented in a simulation that covers many square degrees. For an individual strongly lensed quasar, source sizes from the size of the quasars host galaxy (~ 100 kpc) down to microlensing scales (~ 10^-4 pc) can be probed in a self consistent simulation. Descriptions of various tests of the codes accuracy are given.