Dynamical friction and evolution of black holes in cosmological simulations: a new implementation in OpenGadget3

Abstract

We implement a sub-resolution prescription for the unresolved dynamical friction onto black holes (BHs) in the OpenGadget3 code. We carry out cosmological simulations of a volume of 16 cMpc3 and zoom-ins of a galaxy group and of a galaxy cluster. The advantages of our new technique are assessed in comparison to commonly adopted methods to hamper spurious BH displacements, i.e. repositioning onto a local minimum of the gravitational potential and ad-hoc boosting of the BH particle dynamical mass. The newly-introduced dynamical friction correction provides centering of BHs on host halos which is at least comparable with the other techniques. It predicts half as many merger events with respect to the repositioning prescription, with the advantage of being less prone to leave sub-structures without any central BH. Simulations featuring our dynamical friction prescription produce a smaller (by up to 50% with respect to repositioning) population of wandering BHs and final BH masses in good agreement with observations. As for individual BH-BH interactions, our dynamical friction model captures the gradual inspiraling of orbits before the merger occurs. By contrast, the repositioning scheme, in its most classical renditions considered, describes extremely fast mergers, while the dynamical mass misrepresents the BHs' dynamics, introducing numerical scattering between the orbiting BHs. Given its performances in describing the centering of BHs within host galaxies and the orbiting of BH pair before their merging, our dynamical friction correction opens interesting applications for an accurate description of the evolution of BH demography within cosmological simulations of galaxy formation at different cosmic epochs and within different environments.