The AGORA High-resolution Galaxy Simulations Comparison Project IV: Halo and Galaxy Mass Assembly in a Cosmological Zoom-in Simulation at $z\le2$

TL;DR

This paper compares high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies across eight hydrodynamic codes, analyzing their evolution, structural properties, and metallicity relations down to redshift 2, highlighting code convergence and differences.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of galaxy formation simulations across multiple codes, emphasizing the impact of code-dependent parameters and feedback processes on galaxy evolution.

Findings

Codes generally agree on stellar-to-halo mass ratios at z~2.

Most codes develop rotationally-supported disks at low redshift.

Simulations reproduce observed metallicity relations and gradients.

Abstract

In this fourth paper from the AGORA Collaboration, we study the evolution down to redshift $z=2$ and below of a set of cosmological zoom-in simulations of a Milky Way mass galaxy by eight of the leading hydrodynamic simulation codes. We also compare this CosmoRun suite of simulations with dark matter-only simulations by the same eight codes. We analyze general properties of the halo and galaxy at $z=4$ and 3, and before the last major merger, focusing on the formation of well-defined rotationally-supported disks, the mass-metallicity relation, the specific star formation rate, the gas metallicity gradients, and the non-axisymmetric structures in the stellar disks. Codes generally converge well to the stellar-to-halo mass ratios predicted by semi-analytic models at $z\sim$2. We see that almost all the hydro codes develop rotationally-supported structures at low redshifts. Most agree within 0.5 dex with the observed MZR at high and intermediate redshifts, and reproduce the gas metallicity gradients obtained from analytical models and low-redshift observations. We confirm that the inter-code differences in the halo assembly history reported in the first paper of the collaboration also exist in CosmoRun, making the code-to-code comparison more difficult. We show that such differences are mainly due to variations in code-dependent parameters that control the time-stepping strategy of the gravity solver. We find that variations in the early stellar feedback can also result in differences in the timing of the low-redshift mergers. All the simulation data down to $z=2$ and the auxiliary data will be made publicly available.