Pop III Stellar Masses and IMF

We provide a status report on our current understanding of the mass scales for Pop III.1 and Pop III.2 stars. Since the last review (Norman 2008), substantial progress has been made both numerically and analytically on the late stages of protostellar cloud core collapse, protostar formation and accretion, and stellar evolution taking into account cloud core properties and radiative feedback effects. Based on this, there are growing indications that primordial stars forming from purely cosmological initial conditions (Pop III.1) were substantially more massive than stars forming in preionized gas (Pop III.2) where HD cooling is important. Different stellar endpoints are predicted for these two types of Pop III stars with different chemical enrichment signatures: the former die as pair instability supernovae or intermediate mass black holes, whereas the latter die as iron core-collapse supernovae, leaving behind neutron star and stellar black hole remnants. We review recent simulations which show evidence for binary fragmentation at high densities, and comment on the significance of these results. We then summarize an attempt to directly calculate the Pop III.1 IMF taking into account the latest numerical and analytical models. We conclude with suggestions for the kind of simulations needed next to continue improving our understanding of Pop III star formation, which is a necessary input to understanding high redshift galaxy formation.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of "The First Stars and Galaxies: Challenges for the Next Decade", Austin, TX, March 8-11, 201

Ionization Front Instabilities in Primordial H II Regions

Radiative cooling by metals in shocked gas mediates the formation of ionization front instabilities in the galaxy today that are responsible for a variety of phenomena in the interstellar medium, from the morphologies of nebulae to triggered star formation in molecular clouds. An important question in early reionization and chemical enrichment of the intergalactic medium is whether such instabilities arose in the H II regions of the first stars and primeval galaxies, which were devoid of metals. We present three-dimensional numerical simulations that reveal both shadow and thin-shell instabilities readily formed in primordial gas. We find that the hard UV spectra of Population III stars broadened primordial ionization fronts, causing H2 formation capable of inciting violent thin- shell instabilities in D-type fronts, even in the presence of intense Lyman-Werner flux. The high post- front gas temperatures associated with He ionization sustained and exacerbated shadow instabilities, unaided by molecular hydrogen cooling. Our models indicate that metals eclipsed H2 cooling in I-front instabilities at modest concentrations, from 0.001- 0.01 solar. We conclude that ionization front instabilities were prominent in the H II regions of the first stars and galaxies, influencing the escape of ionizing radiation and metals into the early universe.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, accepted by ApJ with minor revision

Achieving Extreme Resolution in Numerical Cosmology Using Adaptive Mesh Refinement: Resolving Primordial Star Formation

As an entry for the 2001 Gordon Bell Award in the "special" category, we describe our 3-d, hybrid, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code, Enzo, designed for high-resolution, multiphysics, cosmological structure formation simulations. Our parallel implementation places no limit on the depth or complexity of the adaptive grid hierarchy, allowing us to achieve unprecedented spatial and temporal dynamic range. We report on a simulation of primordial star formation which develops over 8000 subgrids at 34 levels of refinement to achieve a local refinement of a factor of 10^12 in space and time. This allows us to resolve the properties of the first stars which form in the universe assuming standard physics and a standard cosmological model. Achieving extreme resolution requires the use of 128-bit extended precision arithmetic (EPA) to accurately specify the subgrid positions. We describe our EPA AMR implementation on the IBM SP2 Blue Horizon system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures. Peer reviewed technical paper accepted to the proceedings of Supercomputing 2001. This entry was a Gordon Bell Prize finalist. For more information visit http://www.TomAbel.com/GB