Lately I’ve been thinking about my contribution to the upcoming NSF proposal. The current idea is to develop a better method for modeling outflows or winds in galaxy simulations. I still need to read more in order to know exactly what work has been done thus far. The main problem appears to be simulation resolution vs computational efficiency. In order to model winds properly, the coupling between electromagnetic radiation and gas must be modeled. Doing this realistically would require the radiation due to stars, supernovae, and AGN to be modeled consistently. From my readings thus far, it appears that current simulations use heuristics to approximate the radiation and the coupling. My goal would be to simulate the input radiation and the coupling in a more realistic way than current methods without significantly increasing the computational effort. In the end, this would likely involve creating more sophisticated heuristics.

Thus far I’ve read a paper describing the entropy-conserving form of SPH which was implemented in the GADGET-2 code. The paper discusses thermodynamic effects such as cooling. I’ve also collected some references that I should read in order to learn more about the current state of energy injection, radiation-gas coupling, and winds.

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