Enhanced mixing in giant impact simulations with a new Lagrangian method

Abstract

Giant impacts (GIs) are common in the late stage of planet formation. The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is widely used for simulating the outcome of such violent collisions, one prominent example being the formation of the Moon. However, a decade of numerical studies in various areas of computational astrophysics has shown that the standard formulation of SPH suffers from several shortcomings such as artificial surface tension and its tendency to promptly damp turbulent motions on scales much larger than the physical dissipation scale, both resulting in the suppression of mixing. In order to quantify how severe these limitations are when modeling GIs we carried out a comparison of simulations with identical initial conditions performed with the standard SPH as well as with the novel Lagrangian Meshless Finite Mass (MFM) method in the GIZMO code. We confirm the lack of mixing between the impactor and target when SPH is employed, while MFM is capable of driving vigorous sub-sonic turbulence and leads to significant mixing between the two bodies. Modern SPH variants with artificial conductivity, a different formulation of the hydro force or reduced artificial viscosity, do not improve mixing as significantly. Angular momentum is conserved similarly well in both methods, but MFM does not suffer from spurious transport induced by artificial viscosity, resulting in a slightly higher angular momentum of the proto-lunar disk. Furthermore, SPH initial conditions exhibit an unphysical density discontinuity at the core-mantle boundary which is easily removed in MFM.