Smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics with the geometric density average force expression

Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Postboks 1029, 0315 Oslo, Norway
e-mail: robertwi@astro.uio.no, sijing.shen@astro.uio.no

Received: 18 September 2019
Accepted: 25 March 2020

Abstract

We present a novel method of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) within the smoothed particle hydrodynamics scheme (SPMHD) using the geometric density average force expression. Geometric density average within smoothed particle hydrodynamics (GDSPH) has recently been shown to reduce the leading order errors and greatly improve the accuracy near density discontinuities, eliminating surface tension effects. Here, we extend the study to investigate how SPMHD benefits from this method. We implement ideal MHD in the GASOLINE2 and CHANGA codes with both GDSPH and traditional smoothed particle hydrodynamics (TSPH) schemes. A constrained hyperbolic divergence cleaning scheme was employed to control the divergence error and a switch for artificial resistivity with minimized dissipation was also used. We tested the codes with a large suite of MHD tests and showed that in all problems, the results are comparable or improved over previous SPMHD implementations. While both GDSPH and TSPH perform well with relatively smooth or highly supersonic flows, GDSPH shows significant improvements in the presence of strong discontinuities and large dynamic scales. In particular, when applied to the astrophysical problem of the collapse of a magnetized cloud, GDSPH realistically captures the development of a magnetic tower and jet launching in the weak-field regime, while exhibiting fast convergence with resolution, whereas TSPH failed to do so. Our new method shows qualitatively similar results to those of the meshless finite mass/volume schemes within the GIZMO code, while remaining computationally less expensive.