Energy distribution and substructure formation in astrophysical MHD simulations

TL;DR

This study evaluates the reliability of advanced astrophysical MHD simulation codes PLUTO and KORAL by analyzing how resolution, dimensionality, and code differences influence magnetic energy dissipation, reconnection, and substructure formation.

Contribution

It provides a systematic comparison of relativistic and non-relativistic MHD simulations, assessing how numerical factors affect key physical processes and code accuracy.

Findings

Sufficient resolution minimizes numerical errors in energy dissipation and reconnection.

Relativistic simulations show significant magnetic energy amplification due to shocks.

KORAL captures more substructures and has slightly higher magnetic energy than PLUTO.

Abstract

During substructure formation in magnetized astrophysical plasma, dissipation of magnetic energy facilitated by magnetic reconnection affects the system dynamics by heating and accelerating the ejected plasmoids. Numerical simulations are a crucial tool for investigating such systems. In astrophysical simulations, the energy dissipation, reconnection rate and substructure formation critically depend on the onset of reconnection of numerical or physical origin. In this paper, we hope to assess the reliability of the state-of-the-art numerical codes, PLUTO and KORAL by quantifying and discussing the impact of dimensionality, resolution, and code accuracy on magnetic energy dissipation, reconnection rate, and substructure formation. We quantitatively compare results obtained with relativistic and non-relativistic, resistive and non-resistive, as well as two- and three-dimensional setups performing the Orszag-Tang test problem. We find the sufficient resolution in each model, for which numerical error is negligible and the resolution does not significantly affect the magnetic energy dissipation and reconnection rate. The non-relativistic simulations show that at sufficient resolution, magnetic and kinetic energies convert to internal energy and heat up the plasma. The results show that in the relativistic system, energy components undergo mutual conversion during the simulation time, which leads to a substantial increase in magnetic energy at 20\% and 90\% of the total simulation time of $10$ light-crossing times -- the magnetic field is amplified by a factor of five due to relativistic shocks. We also show that the reconnection rate in all our simulations is higher than $0.1$, indicating plasmoid-mediated regime. It is shown that in KORAL simulations magnetic energy is slightly larger and more substructures are captured than in PLUTO simulations.