Implementation of feedback in SPH: towards concordance of methods

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that accurate time integration schemes significantly improve energy conservation in SPH simulations of feedback from supernovae and black holes, ensuring concordance of thermal and kinetic feedback methods.

Contribution

It introduces a modified time-step limiter that maintains high energy conservation during strong feedback events in SPH simulations.

Findings

Accurate time integration achieves thermal and kinetic feedback concordance.

The modified limiter reduces energy errors to percent level.

Energy conservation is maintained even with energy injected into a single particle.

Abstract

We perform simulations of feedback from supernovae and black holes with smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). Such strong perturbations are inaccurately handled with standard time integration schemes, leading to poor energy conservation, a problem that is commonly overlooked. We show for the first time that, in the absence of radiative cooling, concordance of thermal and kinetic feedback are achieved when using an accurate time integration. In order to preserve the concordance of feedback methods when using a more efficient time integration scheme - as for instance the hierarchical time-step scheme - we implement a modified version of the time-step limiter proposed by Saitoh & Makino (2009). We apply the limiter to general test cases, and first show that this scheme violates energy conservation up to almost four orders of magnitude when energy is injected at random times. To tackle this issue, we find necessary, not only to ensure a fast information propagation, but also to enforce a prompt response of the system to the energy perturbation. The method proposed here to handle strong feedback events enables us to achieve energy conservation at percent level in all tests, even if all the available energy is injected into only one particle. We argue that concordance of feedback methods can be achieved in numerical simulations only if the time integration scheme preserve a high energy conservation level.