The cosmological simulation code OpenGadget3 – implementation of meshless finite mass

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 526; no. 1; pp. 616 - 644
• Main Authors: Groth, Frederick, Steinwandel, Ulrich P, Valentini, Milena, Dolag, Klaus
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 21-09-2023
• Subjects: galaxies: clusters: general; hydrodynamics; turbulence; methods: numerical
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stad2717

ABSTRACT
Subsonic turbulence plays a major role in determining properties of the intracluster medium (ICM). We introduce a new meshless finite mass (MFM) implementation in OpenGadget3 and apply it to this specific problem. To this end, we present a set of test cases to validate our implementation of the MFM framework in our code. These include but are not limited to: the soundwave and Kepler disc as smooth situations to probe the stability, a Rayleigh–Taylor and Kelvin–Helmholtz instability as popular mixing instabilities, a blob test as more complex example including both mixing and shocks, shock tubes with various Mach numbers, a Sedov blast wave, different tests including self-gravity such as gravitational freefall, a hydrostatic sphere, the Zeldovich-pancake, and a 1015 M⊙ galaxy cluster as cosmological application. Advantages over smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) include increased mixing and a better convergence behaviour. We demonstrate that the MFM-solver is robust, also in a cosmological context. We show evidence that the solver preforms extraordinarily well when applied to decaying subsonic turbulence, a problem very difficult to handle for many methods. MFM captures the expected velocity power spectrum with high accuracy and shows a good convergence behaviour. Using MFM or SPH within OpenGadget3 leads to a comparable decay in turbulent energy due to numerical dissipation. When studying the energy decay for different initial turbulent energy fractions, we find that MFM performs well down to Mach numbers $\mathcal {M}\approx 0.01$. Finally, we show how important the slope limiter and the energy-entropy switch are to control the behaviour and the evolution of the fluids.