Professor Andrew Pontzen's Outputs (7)

The PARADIGM project – I. How early merger histories shape the present-day sizes of Milky-Way-mass galaxies (2025)
Journal Article
Joshi, G. D., Pontzen, A., Agertz, O., Rey, M. P., Read, J., & Pillepich, A. (2025). The PARADIGM project – I. How early merger histories shape the present-day sizes of Milky-Way-mass galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 537(4), 3792-3813. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf276

How mergers affect galaxy formation depends on both feedback processes, and on the geometry and strength of the mergers themselves. We introduce the PARADIGM project, where we study the response of a simulated Milky-Way-mass galaxy (M200c ∼ 1012 M at... Read More about The PARADIGM project – I. How early merger histories shape the present-day sizes of Milky-Way-mass galaxies.

EDGE-INFERNO: Simulating Every Observable Star in Faint Dwarf Galaxies and Their Consequences for Resolved-star Photometric Surveys (2025)
Journal Article
Andersson, E. P., Rey, M. P., Pontzen, A., Cadiou, C., Agertz, O., Read, J. I., & Martin, N. F. (2025). EDGE-INFERNO: Simulating Every Observable Star in Faint Dwarf Galaxies and Their Consequences for Resolved-star Photometric Surveys. The Astrophysical Journal, 978(2), Article 129. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad99d6

Interpretation of data from faint dwarf galaxies is made challenging by observations limited to only the brightest stars. We present a major improvement to tackle this challenge by undertaking zoomed cosmological simulations that resolve the evolutio... Read More about EDGE-INFERNO: Simulating Every Observable Star in Faint Dwarf Galaxies and Their Consequences for Resolved-star Photometric Surveys.

Generalized cold-atom simulators for vacuum decay (2024)
Journal Article
Jenkins, A. C., Moss, I. G., Billam, T. P., Hadzibabic, Z., Peiris, H. V., & Pontzen, A. (2024). Generalized cold-atom simulators for vacuum decay. Physical Review A, 110(3), Article L031301. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.110.l031301

Cold-atom analog experiments are a promising new tool for studying relativistic vacuum decay, enabling one to empirically probe early-Universe theories in the laboratory. However, existing proposals place stringent requirements on the atomic scatteri... Read More about Generalized cold-atom simulators for vacuum decay.

Action and energy clustering of stellar streams in deforming Milky Way dark matter haloes (2024)
Journal Article
Brooks, R. A. N., Sanders, J. L., Petersen, M. S., Pontzen, A., & Lilleengen, S. (2024). Action and energy clustering of stellar streams in deforming Milky Way dark matter haloes. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 532(2), 2657-2673. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1565

Are the fates of supermassive black holes and galaxies determined by individual mergers, or by the properties of their host haloes? (2023)
Journal Article
Davies, J. J., Pontzen, A., & Crain, R. A. (2024). Are the fates of supermassive black holes and galaxies determined by individual mergers, or by the properties of their host haloes?. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 527(3), 4705–4716. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad3456

The fates of massive galaxies are tied to the evolution of their central supermassive black holes (BHs), due to the influence of AGN feedback. Correlations within simulated galaxy populations suggest that the masses of BHs are governed by properties... Read More about Are the fates of supermassive black holes and galaxies determined by individual mergers, or by the properties of their host haloes?.

Particle tagging and its implications for stellar population dynamics (2017)
Journal Article
Le Bret, T., Pontzen, A., Cooper, A., Frenk, C., Zolotov, A., Brooks, A., Governato, F., & Parry, O. (2017). Particle tagging and its implications for stellar population dynamics. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 468(3), 3212-3222. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx552

We establish a controlled comparison between the properties of galactic stellar haloes obtained with hydrodynamical simulations and with ‘particle tagging’. Tagging is a fast way to obtain stellar population dynamics: instead of tracking gas and star... Read More about Particle tagging and its implications for stellar population dynamics.

Milking the spherical cow - on aspherical dynamics in spherical coordinates (2015)
Journal Article
Pontzen, A., Read, J. I., Teyssier, R., Governato, F., Gualandris, A., Roth, N., & Devriendt, J. (2015). Milking the spherical cow - on aspherical dynamics in spherical coordinates. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 451(2), 1366–1379. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv1032

Galaxies and the dark matter haloes that host them are not spherically symmetric, yet spherical symmetry is a helpful simplifying approximation for idealized calculations and analysis of observational data. The assumption leads to an exact conservati... Read More about Milking the spherical cow - on aspherical dynamics in spherical coordinates.