TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mizuno, Yosuke
A1  - Pohl, Martin
A1  - Niemiec, Jacek
A1  - Zhang, Bing
A1  - Nishikawa, Ken-Ichi
A1  - Hardee, Philip E.
T1  - Magnetic-field amplification by turbulence in a relativistic shockpropagating through an inhomogeneous medium
JF  - The astrophysical journal : an international review of spectroscopy and astronomical physics
N2  - We perform two-dimensional relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of a mildly relativistic shock propagating through an inhomogeneous medium. We show that the postshock region becomes turbulent owing to preshock density inhomogeneity, and the magnetic field is strongly amplified due to the stretching and folding of field lines in the turbulent velocity field. The amplified magnetic field evolves into a filamentary structure in two-dimensional simulations. The magnetic energy spectrum is flatter than the Kolmogorov spectrum and indicates that a so-called small-scale dynamo is occurring in the postshock region. We also find that the amount of magnetic-field amplification depends on the direction of the mean preshock magnetic field, and the timescale of magnetic-field growth depends on the shock strength.
KW  - gamma-ray burst: general
KW  - magnetohydrodynamics (MHD)
KW  - methods: numerical
KW  - relativistic processes
KW  - shock waves
KW  - turbulence
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/726/2/62
SN  - 0004-637X
VL  - 726
IS  - 2
PB  - IOP Publ. Ltd.
CY  - Bristol
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tepper-Garcia, Thorsten
A1  - Richter, Philipp
A1  - Schaye, Joop
A1  - Booth, C. M.
A1  - Vecchia, Claudio Dalla
A1  - Theuns, Tom
A1  - Wiersma, Robert P. C.
T1  - Absorption signatures of warm-hot gas at low redshift o vi
JF  - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
N2  - We investigate the origin and physical properties of O vi absorbers at low redshift (z = 0.25) using a subset of cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project. Intervening O vi absorbers are believed to trace shock-heated gas in the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) and may thus play a key role in the search for the missing baryons in the present-day Universe. When compared to observations, the predicted distributions of the different O vi line parameters (column density, Doppler parameter, rest equivalent width W-r) from our simulations exhibit a lack of strong O vi absorbers, a discrepancy that has also been found by Oppenheimer & Dave. This suggests that physical processes on subgrid scales (e.g. turbulence) may strongly influence the observed properties of O vi systems. We find that the intervening O vi absorption arises mainly in highly metal enriched (10-1 < Z/Z(circle dot) less than or similar to 1) gas at typical overdensities of 1 < /<<>> less than or similar to 102. One-third of the O vi absorbers in our simulation are found to trace gas at temperatures T < 105 K, while the rest arises in gas at higher temperatures, most of them around T = 105.3 +/- 0.5 K. These temperatures are much higher than inferred by Oppenheimer & Dave, probably because that work did not take the suppression of metal-line cooling by the photoionizing background radiation into account. While the O vi resides in a similar region of (, T)-space as much of the shock-heated baryonic matter, the vast majority of this gas has a lower metal content and does not give rise to detectable O vi absorption. As a consequence of the patchy metal distribution, O vi absorbers in our simulations trace only a very small fraction of the cosmic baryons (< 2 per cent) and the cosmic metals. Instead, these systems presumably trace previously shock-heated, metal-rich material from galactic winds that is now mixing with the ambient gas and cooling. The common approach of comparing O vi and H i column densities to estimate the physical conditions in intervening absorbers from QSO observations may be misleading, as most of the H i (and most of the gas mass) is not physically connected with the high-metallicity patches that give rise to the O vi absorption.
KW  - methods: numerical
KW  - galaxies: formation
KW  - intergalactic medium
KW  - quasars: absorption lines
KW  - cosmology: theory
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.18123.x
SN  - 0035-8711
VL  - 413
IS  - 1
SP  - 190
EP  - 212
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -