Simulating the formation and evolution of galaxies with EvoL, the Padova N-body Tree-SPH code

The importance of numerical simulations in astrophysics is constantly growing, because of the complexity, the multi-scaling properties and the non-linearity of many physical phenomena. In particular, cosmological and galaxy-sized simulations of structure formation have cast light on different aspects, giving answers to many questions, but raising a number of new issues to be investigated. Over the last decade, great effort has been devoted in Padova to develop a tool explicitly designed to study the problem of galaxy formation and evolution, with particular attention to the early-type ones. To this aim, many simulations have been run on CINECA supercomputers (see publications list below). The next step is the new release of EvoL, a Fortran N-body code capable to follow in great detail many different aspects of stellar, interstellar and cosmological physics. In particular, special care has been paid to the properties of stars and their interplay with the surrounding interstellar medium (ISM), as well as to the multiphase nature of the ISM, to the setting of the initial and boundary conditions, and to the correct description of gas physics via modern formulations of the classical Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics algorithms. Moreover, a powerful tool to compare numerical predictions with observables has been developed, self-consistently closing the whole package. A library of new simulations, run with EvoL on CINECA supercomputers, is to be built in the next years, while new physics, including magnetic properties of matter and more exotic energy feedback effects, is to be added.