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Title: COSMIC REIONIZATION ON COMPUTERS: NUMERICAL AND PHYSICAL CONVERGENCE

Journal Article · · Astrophysical Journal

In this paper I show that simulations of reionization performed under the Cosmic Reionization On Computers project do converge in space and mass, albeit rather slowly. A fully converged solution (for a given star formation and feedback model) can be determined at a level of precision of about 20%, but such a solution is useless in practice, since achieving it in production-grade simulations would require a large set of runs at various mass and spatial resolutions, and computational resources for such an undertaking are not yet readily available. In order to make progress in the interim, I introduce a weak convergence correction factor in the star formation recipe, which allows one to approximate the fully converged solution with finite-resolution simulations. The accuracy of weakly converged simulations approaches a comparable, ∼20% level of precision for star formation histories of individual galactic halos and other galactic properties that are directly related to star formation rates, such as stellar masses and metallicities. Yet other properties of model galaxies, for example, their H i masses, are recovered in the weakly converged runs only within a factor of 2.

OSTI ID:
22518497
Journal Information:
Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 821, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Cited By (2)

Warm Dark Matter and Cosmic Reionization journal January 2018
Constraining the Tail End of Reionization Using Ly α Transmission Spikes journal April 2019