Shadowfax

With the release of the newest version of the code, all code from the private UGent repository has now been made public. An exception to this is the adaptive mesh algorithm, which cannot be incorporated into the master branch directly. The adaptive mesh algorithm will be added in the coming week, but will continue to reside in a separate branch until it can be coupled to the master branch in a clean way. This algorithm is the subject of a publication that might be submitted in the near future.

The second part of Yorick Van Den Bossche’s master’s thesis, star formation and stellar feedback, has been added to the public repository. To this end, a third type of particle was added to the code, which acts very similar as a dark matter particle, but also keeps track of its age. Star formation can be activated by setting a new flag in the parameter file. When star formation is active, gas particles are converted into star particles if they meet three star formation criteria: they have to be cold enough, dense enough, and need to be in a region of converging flow.

The main branch of the code now also contains a first implementation of radiative cooling (and heating). The cooling is based on the cooling tables of De Rijcke et al. (2013), and uses a five parameter model whereby the cooling depends on the temperature, two metallicity tracers ([Fe/H] and [Mg/Fe]), the density, and the redshift. Currently the redshift is not yet implemented in Shadowfax, and the cooling tables for a fixed redshift of 11 are used (which means no heating).

The slides for my talk during the Great Lakes Cosmology and Galaxies workshop are now available: https://www.dwarfs.ugent.be/shadowfax/uploads/Vandenbroucke_presentation.pdf. The movies used in the presentation can be found in the gallery.

The initial conditions and scripts needed to run the L1 convergence tests from the code paper have been added to the test problem page.

The very primitive Shadowfax website has been transformed into this more modern version, which includes an automated blogging system to make announcements about new results or new features of the code, and a gallery of visual eye-candy.