Competitive Accretion in Sheet Geometry and the Stellar IMF

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations in sheet-like molecular cloud geometries to explore how competitive accretion influences the high-mass end of the stellar initial mass function, revealing a tendency towards a universal slope near 1.

Contribution

It demonstrates that competitive accretion in sheet geometries naturally produces a power-law mass function with a slope close to 1, extending the applicability of the theory beyond cluster environments.

Findings

Mass function develops a power-law tail at high masses

Accretion rates follow a M^2 dependence at high masses

Mass function slope tends towards approximately 1

Abstract

We report a set of numerical experiments aimed at addressing the applicability of competitive accretion to explain the high-mass end of the stellar initial mass function in a sheet geometry with shallow gravitational potential, in contrast to most previous simulations which have assumed formation in a cluster gravitational potential. Our flat cloud geometry is motivated by models of molecular cloud formation due to large-scale flows in the interstellar medium. The experiments consisted of SPH simulations of gas accretion onto sink particles formed rapidly from Jeans-unstable dense clumps placed randomly in the finite sheet. These simplifications allow us to study accretion with a minimum of free parameters, and to develop better statistics on the resulting mass spectra. We considered both clumps of equal mass and gaussian distributions of masses, and either uniform or spatially-varying gas densities. In all cases, the sink mass function develops a power law tail at high masses, with $dN/dlog M \propto M^{-\Gamma}$. The accretion rates of individual sinks follow $\dot{M} \propto M^2$ at high masses; this results in a continual flattening of the slope of the mass function towards an asymptotic form $\Gamma \sim 1$ (where the Salpeter slope is $\Gamma = 1.35$). The asymptotic limit is most rapidly reached when starting from a relatively broad distribution of initial sink masses. In general the resulting upper mass slope is correlated with the maximum sink mass; higher sink masses are found in simulations with flatter upper mass slopes. Although these simulations are of a highly idealized situation, the results suggest that competitive accretion may be relevant in a wider variety of environments than previously considered, and in particular that the upper mass distribution may generally evolve towards a limiting value of $\Gamma \sim 1$.