Moving-mesh cosmology: properties of neutral hydrogen in absorption

We examine the distribution of neutral hydrogen in cosmological simulations carried out with the new moving-mesh code AREPO and compare it with the corresponding GADGET simulations based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. The two codes use identical gravity solvers and baryonic physics implementations, but very different methods for solving the Euler equations, allowing us to assess how numerical effects associated with the hydro solver impact the results of simulations. Here we focus on an analysis of the neutral gas, as detected in quasar absorption lines. We find that the high column density regime probed by damped Ly alpha (DLA) and Lyman limit systems (LLS) exhibits significant differences between the codes. GADGET produces spurious artefacts in large haloes in the form of gaseous clumps, boosting the LLS cross-section. Furthermore, it forms haloes with denser central baryonic cores than AREPO, which leads to a substantially greater DLA cross-section from smaller haloes. AREPO thus produces a significantly lower cumulative abundance of DLAs, which is intriguingly in much closer agreement with observations. The column density function, however, is not altered enough to significantly reduce the discrepancy with the observed value. For the low column density gas probed by the Ly alpha forest, the codes differ only at the level of a few per cent, suggesting that this regime is quite well described by both methods, a fact that is reassuring for the many Ly alpha studies carried out with SPH thus far. While the residual differences are smaller than the errors on current Ly alpha forest data, we note that this will likely change for future precision experiments.