Investigating the influence of magnetic fields upon structure formation with AMIGA - a C code for cosmological magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract

Despite greatly improved observational methods, the presence of magnetic fields at cosmological scales and their role in the process of large-scale structure formation still remains unclear. In this paper we want to address the question how the presence of a hypothetical primordial magnetic field on large scales influences the cosmic structure formation in numerical simulations. As a tool for carrying out such simulations, we present our new numerical code AMIGA. It combines an N-body code with an Eulerian grid-based solver for the full set of MHD equations in order to conduct simulations of dark matter, baryons and magnetic fields in a self-consistent way in a fully cosmological setting. Our numerical scheme includes effective methodes to ensure proper capturing of shocks and highly supersonic flows and a divergence-free magnetic field. The high accuracy of the code is demonstrated by a number of numerical tests. We then present a series of cosmological MHD simulations and confirm that, in order to have a significant effect on the distribution of matter on large scales, the primordial magnetic field strength would have to be significantly higher than the current observational and theoretical constraints.