The simulation techniques and applications in modern cosmology

Abstract

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 <italic>N</italic>-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.