现代宇宙学中的数值模拟技术和应用

宇宙尺度上物理过程的多样性和高度非线性使数值模拟成为现代宇宙学必不可少的研究手段,它不仅可以细致追踪宇宙结构的形成和演化历史,同时也为观测和理论模型的检验建立了一个桥梁.本文将总结计算宇宙学领域技术方法的最新发展,包括无碰撞粒子N体数值模拟技术,引入重子物理的计算流体方法.在此基础上,我们将针对现代宇宙学的核心科学问题,简要综述数值模拟技术在面向下一代巡天观测,尤其是暗物质和暗能量探测方面的实际应用.此外,我们选择性地讨论了数值模拟在第一代恒星和反馈作用、宇宙中的气体吸积和恒星形成,以及高红移星系盘的形成研究中所发挥的作用.因应下一代大规模巡天的开展和超级计算技术的快速进步,我们也展望了在未来十年计算宇宙学和相关科学可能取得的进展及发展趋势.

The simulation techniques and applications in modern cosmology

The diversity and highly nonlinearity in physical processes occurred on comic scales has made the simulation technique an essential and powerful tool of modern cosmology researches. It can not only be applied to track the formation and evolution of the cosmic structures, and also bridges the gap between the astronomical observations and theoretical models. This articles is going to give a short review of state of the art of computational cosmology, including the N-body simulation techniques for collisionless particles and computational hydrodynamics with baryonic physics. Moreover, we will target the core scientific questions in modern cosmology, and present a brief summary of applications of extremely large simulations in next generation sky survey especially designed for detections of dark matter and dark energy. In addition, we describe a few highlights of numerical simulation in studying the formation of the first stars, the first galaxies, cold gas accretions and star formation as well as galactic disk formation at high redshifts. In accordance to the upcoming large sky surveys and the rapid progresses made in supercomputing technology, we give an outlook for the next decade, a perspective of what computational challenges will be met, and what exciting headway can be expected in computational cosmology and relative sciences.