The circumgalactic medium around Milky Way-mass galaxies

The gaseous haloes around galaxies, also known as the circumgalactic medium, or CGM, are an integral part to understanding galaxy formation. Gas accreting onto galaxies from the intergalactic medium, providing fuel for future star formation, necessarily has to first pass through the CGM. Similarly, feedback from various sources in the galaxy will create large-scale galactic winds that heat and enrich the CGM. In this project, the student will make use of the moving-mesh code Arepo and focus on zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-mass haloes. This halo mass scale is interesting both because we ourselves live in such a system and because the CGM of such galaxies is complex and multiphase, with a range of different physical processes all contributing to its evolution to a similar extent. The student will study the properties of the CGM, its origins and its future roll in the evolution of the galaxy ecosystem with a specific focus on the multiphase nature of the gas. This will be done by using tracer particles, that stochastically follow the gas flow, to connect gas flows at different times. They will then proceed to run additional simulations with various physics variations, such as cosmic ray feedback, in order to understand their influence on the formation of galaxies, the outflows that are created, and the evolution of the CGM. The student will become an expert in galaxy formation and related topics and learn how to perform cosmological, magnetohydrodynamical simulations.