Adaptive Mesh Refinement Simulations of Cosmic Ray Electrons in Merging Galaxy Clusters
Samuel Skillman, University of Colorado at Boulder
We present the first results of adaptive mesh refinement simulations of galaxy clusters capable of following the high-energy cosmic ray electron and proton populations. In doing so, we calculate the synthetic radio emission and compare them to recent observations in order to constrain fundamental physical processes such as particle acceleration as well as the nature of the magnetized plasma environment they are embedded in. In addition to developing the numerical methods capable of following these populations, we extend existing analysis and visualization tools capable of handling the large, complex data structures generated. In particular we build synthetic observation tools necessary to study the polarization structure of the radio-emitting plasma. These tools are built on upon a hybrid MPI+OpenMP framework capable of being deployed on large computational resources.
Abstract Author(s): Samuel W. Skillman, Brian W. O'Shea, Eric J. Hallman, Jack O. Burns