Shock Waves in Eulerian Cosmological Simulations: Main Properties and Acceleration of Cosmic Rays

TL;DR

This study analyzes large-scale shocks in cosmological simulations, focusing on their properties, evolution, and role in cosmic ray acceleration, highlighting the dominance of weak shocks and their energy dissipation contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a new post-processing method to accurately model re-ionization effects and characterizes shock properties across different cosmic environments in simulations.

Findings

Weak shocks dominate energy dissipation in the cosmic volume.

Approximately 20% of shock energy converts into cosmic rays at present epoch.

Weak shocks are more prevalent than previously reported.

Abstract

We analyze the properties of Large Scale Shocks in a cosmological volume of size 103Mpc/h simulated with the public 1.0.1 release of the ENZO code. Different methods to identify and characterize shocks in post processing are discussed together with their uncertainties. Re-ionization affects the properties of shocks in simulations, and we propose a fitting procedure to model accurately the effect of re-ionization in non--radiative simulations, with a post--processing procedure. We investigate the properties of shocks by means of a procedure which uses jumps in the velocity variables across the cells in the simulations and this allows us to have a viable description of shocks also in relatively under-dense cosmic regions. We derive the distributions of the number of shocks and of the energy dissipated at these shocks as a function of their Mach number, and discuss the evolution of these distributions with cosmological time and across different cosmic environments (clusters, outskirts, filaments, voids). In line with some previous numerical studies (e.g. Ryu et al.2003, Pfrommer et al.2006) relatively weak shocks are found to dominate the process of energy dissipation in the simulated cosmic volume, although we find a larger ratio between weak and strong shocks with respect to previous studies. We estimate the rate of injection of CR at Large Scale Shocks by adopting injection efficiencies taken from previous numerical calculations. The flux dissipated in the form of CR within the whole simulated volume at the present epoch is about 20 per cent of the thermal energy dissipated at shocks; this fraction is smaller within galaxy clusters.