A&A 385, 337-364 (2002)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20011817
Cosmological hydrodynamics with adaptive mesh refinement
A new high resolution code called RAMSES
R. TeyssierCommissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, Direction des Sciences de la Matière, Service d'Astrophysique, Centre d'Études de Saclay, L'orme des Merisiers, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France and Numerical Investigations in Cosmology (NIC group), CEA Saclay, France
(Received 18 June 2001 / Accepted 12 December 2001 )
Abstract
A new N-body and hydrodynamical code, called RAMSES, is presented. It
has been designed to study structure formation in the universe with
high spatial resolution. The code is based on Adaptive Mesh
Refinement (AMR) technique, with a tree-based data structure allowing
recursive grid refinements on a cell-by-cell basis. The N-body solver
is very similar to the one developed for the ART code
[CITE], with minor differences in the exact
implementation. The hydrodynamical solver is based on a second-order
Godunov method, a modern shock-capturing scheme known to compute
accurately the thermal history of the fluid component. The accuracy
of the code is carefully estimated using various test cases, from pure
gas dynamical tests to cosmological ones. The specific refinement
strategy used in cosmological simulations is described, and potential
spurious effects associated with shock waves propagation in the
resulting AMR grid are discussed and found to be negligible. Results
obtained in a large N-body and hydrodynamical simulation of structure
formation in a low density
CDM universe are reported,
with
2563 particles and
cells in the AMR grid,
reaching a formal resolution of
81923. A convergence analysis of
different quantities, such as dark matter density power spectrum, gas
pressure power spectrum and individual haloe temperature profiles,
shows that numerical results are converging down to the actual
resolution limit of the code, and are well reproduced by recent
analytical predictions in the framework of the halo model.
Key words: gravitation -- hydrodynamics -- methods: numerical -- cosmology: theory -- cosmology: large-scale structure of Universe
© ESO 2002