# On the effect of galactic outflows in cosmological simulations of disc galaxies

## TL;DR

This study examines how different galactic outflow models influence the formation and evolution of disc galaxies in cosmological simulations, highlighting the importance of feedback regulation for realistic galaxy morphology.

## Contribution

It demonstrates the critical impact of sub-resolution feedback prescriptions on the stellar disc properties in cosmological simulations of Milky Way-sized galaxies.

## Key findings

- Outflow models significantly shape the stellar disc at low redshift.
- Effective feedback must regulate early star formation and gas inflow.
- Hydrodynamic scheme interacts strongly with feedback prescriptions.

## Abstract

We investigate the impact of galactic outflow modelling on the formation and evolution of a disc galaxy, by performing a suite of cosmological simulations with zoomed-in initial conditions of a Milky Way-sized halo. We verify how sensitive the general properties of the simulated galaxy are to the way in which stellar feedback triggered outflows are implemented, keeping initial conditions, simulation code and star formation (SF) model all fixed. We present simulations that are based on a version of the GADGET3 code where our sub-resolution model is coupled with an advanced implementation of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics that ensures a more accurate fluid sampling and an improved description of gas mixing and hydrodynamical instabilities. We quantify the strong interplay between the adopted hydrodynamic scheme and the sub-resolution model describing SF and feedback. We consider four different galactic outflow models, including the one introduced by Dalla Vecchia and Schaye (2012) and a scheme that is inspired by the Springel and Hernquist (2003) model. We find that the sub-resolution prescriptions adopted to generate galactic outflows are the main shaping factor of the stellar disc component at low redshift. The key requirement that a feedback model must have to be successful in producing a disc-dominated galaxy is the ability to regulate the high-redshift SF (responsible for the formation of the bulge component), the cosmological infall of gas from the large-scale environment, and gas fall-back within the galactic radius at low redshift, in order to avoid a too high SF rate at $z=0$.