Two-Body Relaxation in Cosmological Simulations

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Abstract
The importance of two-body relaxation in cosmological simulations is explored with simulations in which there are two species of particles. The cases of mass ratio sqrt(2):1 and 4:1 are investigated. Simulations are run with both a fixed softening length and adaptive softening using the publicly available codes GADGET and MLAPM, respectively. The effects of two-body relaxation are detected in both the density profiles of halos and the mass function of halos. The effects are more pronounced with a fixed softening length, but even in this case they are not so large as to suggest that results obtained with one mass species are significantly affected by two-body relaxation. The simulations that use adaptive softening are slightly less affected by two-body relaxation and produce slightly higher central densities in the largest halos. They run about three times faster than the simulations that use a fixed softening length.

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