Cosmological Simulations with Scale-Free Initial Conditions II: Radiative Cooling

The growth of structure from scale-free initial conditions is one of the most important tests of cosmological simulation methods, providing a realistically complex problem in which numerical results can be compared to rigorous analytic scaling laws. Previous studies of this problem have incorporated gravitational dynamics and adiabatic gas dynamics, but radiative cooling, an essential element of the physics of galaxy formation, normally introduces a preferred timescale and therefore violates the conditions necessary for self-similar evolution. We show that for any specified value of the initial power spectrum index n [where P (k) ∝ kn], there is a family of power-law cooling functions that preserves self-similarity by ensuring that the cooling time in an object of the characteristic mass M∗ is a fixed fraction t̂C of the Hubble time. We perform hydrodynamic numerical simulations with an Einstein-de Sitter cosmology, a baryon fraction of 5%, Gaussian initial conditions, two different power spectrum indices, and four values of t̂C for each index, ranging from no cooling to strong cooling. We restrict the numerical simulations to two dimensions in order to allow exploration of a wide parameter space with adequate dynamic range. In all cases, the simulations are remarkably successful at reproducing the analytically predicted scalings of the mass function of dissipated objects and the gas temperature distributions and cooled gas fractions in collapsed systems. While similar success with 3-D simulations must still be demonstrated, our results have encouraging implications for numerical studies of galaxy formation, indicating that simulations with resolution comparable to that in Previous Address: Ohio State University, Department of Astronomy, Columbus, OH 43210