Fast full N-body simulations of generic modified gravity: derivative coupling models

Abstract

We present mg-glam, a code developed for the very fast production of full N-body cosmological simulations in modified gravity (MG) models. We describe the implementation, numerical tests and first results of a large suite of cosmological simulations for two broad classes of MG models with derivative coupling terms — the Vainshtein- and Kmouflage-type models — which respectively features the Vainshtein and Kmouflage screening mechanism. Derived from the parallel particle-mesh code glam, mg-glam incorporates an efficient multigrid relaxation technique to solve the characteristic nonlinear partial differential equations of these models. For Kmouflage, we have proposed a new algorithm for the relaxation solver, and run the first simulations of the model to understand its cosmological behaviour. In a companion paper, we describe versions of this code developed for conformally-coupled MG models, including several variants of f(R) gravity, the symmetron model and coupled quintessence. Altogether, mg-glam has so far implemented the prototypes for most MG models of interest, and is broad and versatile. The code is highly optimised, with a tremendous (over two orders of magnitude) speedup when comparing its running time with earlier N-body codes, while still giving accurate predictions of the matter power spectrum and dark matter halo abundance. mg-glam is ideal for the generation of large numbers of MG simulations that can be used in the construction of mock galaxy catalogues and accurate emulators for ongoing and future galaxy surveys.