Towards a new modelling of gas flows in a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation and evolution

Abstract

We present an extended version of the semi-analytical model, GalICS. Like its predecessor, eGalICS applies a post-treatment of the baryonic physics on pre-computed dark-matter merger trees extracted from an N-body simulation. We review all the mechanisms that affect, at any given time, the formation and evolution of a galaxy in its host dark-matter halo. We mainly focus on the gas cycle from the smooth cosmological accretion to feedback processes. To follow this cycle with high accuracy we introduce some novel prescriptions: i) a smooth baryonic accretion with two phases: a cold mode and a hot mode built on the continuous dark-matter accretion. In parallel to this smooth accretion, we implement the standard photoionisation modelling to reduce the input gas flow on the smallest structures. ii) a complete monitoring of the hot gas phase. We compute the evolution of the core density, the mean temperature and the instantaneous escape fraction of the hot atmosphere by considering that the hot gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium in the dark-matter potential well, and by applying a principle of conservation of energy on the treatment of gas accretion, supernovae and super massive black hole feedback iii) a new treatment for disc instabilities based on the formation, the migration and the disruption of giant clumps. The migration of such clumps in gas-rich galaxies allows to form pseudo-bulges. The different processes in the gas cycle act on different time scales, and we thus build an adaptive time-step scheme to solve the evolution equations. The model presented here is compared in detail to the observations of stellar-mass functions, star formation rates, and luminosity functions, in a companion paper.