Particle loads for cosmological simulations with equal-mass dark matter and baryonic particles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method using a glass approach to generate initial conditions for cosmological simulations with equal-mass dark matter and baryonic particles, reducing spurious heating effects.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel technique to create more flexible two-component particle loads with equal-mass particles, improving simulation accuracy over previous grid-based methods.

Findings

The method produces particle loads with minimal power spectrum and good isotropy.

Equal-mass particle setups mitigate spurious collisional heating.

The approach is extendable to multiple components.

Abstract

Traditional cosmological hydrodynamical simulations usually assume equal-numbered but unequal-mass dark matter and baryonic particles, which can lead to spurious collisional heating due to energy equipartition. To avoid such a numerical heating effect, a simulation setup with equal-mass dark matter and baryonic particles, which corresponds to a particle number ratio of $N_{\rm DM}:N_{\rm gas} = \Omega_{\rm cdm} / \Omega_{\rm b}$, is preferred. However, previous studies have typically used grid-based particle loads to prepare such initial conditions, which can only reach specific values for $N_{\rm DM}:N_{\rm gas}$ due to symmetry requirements. In this study, we propose a method based on the glass approach that can generate two-component particle loads with more general $N_{\rm DM}:N_{\rm gas}$ ratios. The method simultaneously relaxes two Poisson particle distributions by introducing an additional repulsive force between particles of the same component. We show that the final particle load closely follows the expected minimal power spectrum, $P(k) \propto k^{4}$, exhibits good homogeneity and isotropy properties, and remains sufficiently stable under gravitational interactions. Both the dark matter and gas components individually also exhibit uniform and isotropic distributions. We apply our method to two-component cosmological simulations and demonstrate that an equal-mass particle setup effectively mitigates the spurious collisional heating that arises in unequal-mass simulations. Our method can be extended to generate multi-component uniform and isotropic distributions. Our code based on Gadget-2 is available at https://github.com/liaoshong/gadget-2glass .