Large Scale Simulations of Astrophysical Jets

Abstract

We present recent results of our three-dimensional (3-D) simulations of astrophysical jets. These efforts use a highly parallelized version of the VH-1 Hydrodynamics Code in the hydrodynamics (HD) regime (Colella and Woodward \textit{1984}, Mignone \textit{et al. 2007}, and Saxton et al. \textit{2005} in the hydrodynamic regime; and the PLUTO code (Mignone \textit{et al. 2007} for the hydrodynamic, magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD), relativistic hydrodynamic (RHD), and relativistic, magnetohydrodynamic (RMHD). We also continue our investigation using particle-in-cell simulations to benchmark a wave-population model of the two-stream instability and associated plasma instabilities in order to determine the energy deposition and momentum transfer rates for these modes of the jet-ambient medium interactions. In this regard, we believe that it is important to note that ``simple HD, RHD, and RMHD simulations are unable to show the real effects of these essentially microscopic (at least in terms of the scales of the simulations) processes. Thus, these effects are being considered for use in a multi-scale code that incorporates energy deposition rate and momentum transfer from strong plasma turbulence generated by the interaction of the astrophysical jet with the ambient medium through which it propagates. In this work, we show some some results from the modeling of these jets for a fully 3-D simulation of relativistic jets using the PLUTO code in the RHD regime. The jets in question have a relativistic velocity $\beta = 0.988c$. We whow a specific example where the disk gravitational potential affects the jet propagation.