We decribe direct numerical simulations of turbulent astrophysical media exposed to the redshift zero metagalactic background. The simulations assume solar composition and explicitly track ionizations, recombinations, and ion-by-ion radiative cooling for hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, sodium, magnesium, silicon, and iron. Each run reaches a global steady state that not only depends on the ionization parameter, U, and mass-weighted average temperature, TMW, but also on the the one-dimensional turbulent velocity dispersion, σ1D.

We carry out runs that span a grid of models with U ranging from 0 to 10−2 and σ1D ranging from 12 to 58 km s−1, and we vary the product of the mean density and the driving scale of the turbulence, nL, which determines the average temperature of the medium, from nL =1016 to nL =1020 cm−2. The turbulent Mach numbers of our simulations vary from M ≈ 0.5 for the lowest velocity dispersions cases to M ≈ 20 for the largest velocity dispersion cases. When M ≲1, turbulent effects are minimal, and the species abundances are reasonably described as those of a uniform photoionized medium at a fixed temperature. On the other hand, when M ≳ 1, dynamical simulations such as the ones carried out here, are required to accurately predict the species abundances.

We gather our results into a set of tables, to allow future redshift zero studies of the intergalactic medium to account for turbulent effects. They are available at http://zofia.sese.asu.edu/~evan/turbspecies/ and will be updated as we increase our parameter study. These results are explained in more detailed in Gray, Scannapieco, & Kasen (2015), and Gray and Scannapieco (2015)