Molecular hydrogen regulated star formation in cosmological SPH
  simulations
  It has been shown observationally that star formation (SF) correlates tightly
with the presence of molecular hydrogen (H$_2$). Therefore it would be
important to investigate its implication on galaxy formation in a cosmological
context. In the present work, we track the H$_2$ mass fraction within our
cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code GADGET-3 using an
equilibrium analytic model by Krumholz et al. This model allows us to regulate
the star formation in our simulation by the local abundance of H$_2$ rather
than the total cold gas density, and naturally introduce the dependence of star
formation on metallicity. We investigate implications of the equilibrium
H$_2$-based SF model on galaxy population properties, such as the
stellar-to-halo mass ratio (SHMR), baryon fraction, cosmic star formation rate
density (SFRD), galaxy specific SFR, galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMF), and
Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) relationship. The advantage of our work over the
previous ones is having a large sample of simulated galaxies in a cosmological
volume from high-redshift to $z=0$. We find that low-mass halos with
M$_{DM}<10^{10.5}$ M$_\odot$ are less efficient in producing stars in the
H$_2$-based SF model at $z\geq6$, which brings the simulations to a better
agreement with observational estimates of SHMR and GSMF at the low-mass end.
This is particularly evident by a reduction in the number of low-mass galaxies
at M$_\star\leq10^{8}$ M$_\odot$ in the GSMF. The overall SFRD is also reduced
at high-$z$ in the H$_2$ run, which results in slightly higher SFRD at
low-redshift due to more abundant gas available for star formation at later
times. This new H$_2$ model is able to reproduce the empirical KS relationship
at $z=0$ naturally without the need for setting its normalization by hand, and
overall it seems to have more advantages than the previous pressure-based SF
model.
