A Stable, Accurate Methodology for High Mach Number, Strong Magnetic Field Mhd Turbulence with Adaptive Mesh Refinement: Resolution and Refinement Studies

Performing a stable, long duration simulation of driven MHD turbulence with a high thermal Mach number and a strong initial magnetic field is a challenge to high-order Godunov ideal MHD schemes because of the difficulty in guaranteeing positivity of the density and pressure. We have implemented a robust combination of reconstruction schemes, Riemann solvers, limiters, and Constrained Transport EMF averaging schemes that can meet this challenge, and using this strategy, we have developed a new Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) MHD module of the ORION2 code. We investigate the effects of AMR on several statistical properties of a turbulent ideal MHD system with a thermal Mach number of 10 and a plasma β0 of 0.1 as initial conditions; our code is shown to be stable for simulations with higher Mach numbers (Mrms = 17.3) and smaller plasma beta (β0 = 0.0067) as well. Our results show that the quality of the turbulence simulation is generally related to the volume-averaged refinement. Our AMR simulations show that the turbulent dissipation coefficient for supersonic MHD turbulence is about 0.5, in agreement with unigrid simulations. Subject headings: Magnetic fields—MHD—ISM: magnetic fields—ISM: kinematics and dynamics— stars:formation—methods: numerical—turbulence