Smoothed Particle Magnetohydrodynamics: A State of the Union
Summary
This is a review of the current state-of-the-art of MHD in SPH, presented at the 11th SPHERIC workshop at the T.U.M. in
June 2016. In this we discuss various instabilities other pitfalls within current SPMHD schemes and consider the limits of current techniques.
Formal Abstract
Obtaining a stable magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) formalism in SPH - i.e. smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics (SPMHD) - has proven remarkably difficult. To implement MHD requires two steps: a modification to the momentum equation and an induction equation, and both present challenges. We first provide an overview of how SPMHD is implemented, and then discuss how this implementation fails and the limitation of various corrective methods - with particular reference to the effects of particle disorder. Although there are many problems for which, with careful choice of corrective measures, good results can be obtained, we then show that, at the very limits of the state of the art, the ability to perform stable MHD calculations in SPH is curtailed by numerical issues.
Published in the proceedings of the "11th international SPHERIC workshop", T.U.M., Germany, 13-16 June 2016.
E-print available on the arXiv as arXiv:1606.06972 and
bibliographic data on the ADS.
