SEREN - A new SPH code for star and planet formation simulations

TL;DR

SEREN is a versatile, modular hybrid SPH and N-body simulation code in Fortran designed for star and planet formation studies, featuring advanced physics, efficient algorithms, and the ability to switch between hydrodynamics and N-body dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, high-performance simulation tool combining SPH and N-body methods with novel features like hierarchical time-stepping and sink particles for star formation modeling.

Findings

Demonstrates accurate simulation of star and planet formation processes.

Shows good scalability and performance in tests.

Provides detailed algorithms and flexible physics options.

Abstract

We present SEREN, a new hybrid Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and N-body code designed to simulate astrophysical processes such as star and planet formation. It is written in Fortran 95/2003 and has been parallelised using OpenMP. SEREN is designed in a flexible, modular style, thereby allowing a large number of options to be selected or disabled easily and without compromising performance. SEREN uses the conservative `grad-h' formulation of SPH, but can easily be configured to use traditional SPH or Godunov SPH. Thermal physics is treated either with a barotropic equation of state, or by solving the energy equation and modelling the transport of cooling radiation. A Barnes-Hut tree is used to obtain neighbour lists and compute gravitational accelerations efficiently, and an hierarchical time-stepping scheme is used to reduce the number of computations per timestep. Dense gravitationally bound objects are replaced by sink particles, to allow the simulation to be evolved longer, and to facilitate the identification of protostars and the compilation of stellar and binary properties. At the termination of a hydrodynamical simulation, SEREN has the option of switching to a pure N-body simulation, using a 4th-order Hermite integrator, and following the ballistic evolution of the sink particles (e.g. to determine the final binary statistics once a star cluster has relaxed). We describe in detail all the algorithms implemented in SEREN and we present the results of a suite of tests designed to demonstrate the fidelity of SEREN and its performance and scalability. Further information and additional tests of SEREN can be found at the web-page http://www.astro.group.shef.ac.uk/seren.