Implementation of feedback in SPH: towards concordance of methods

Understand

We perform simulations of feedback from supernovae and black holes with smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH).

• Such strong perturbations are inaccurately handled with standard time integration schemes, leading to poor energy conservation, a problem that is commonly overlooked.
• We show for the first time that, in the absence of radiative cooling, concordance of thermal and kinetic feedback are achieved when using an accurate time integration.
• In order to preserve the concordance of feedback methods when using a more efficient time integration scheme - as for instance the hierarchical time-step scheme - we implement a modified version of the time-step limiter proposed by Saitoh & Makino (2009).