Gas Accretion is Dominated by Warm Ionized Gas in Milky Way-Mass
  Galaxies at z ~ 0
  We perform high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations of a Milky Way-mass
galaxy in a fully cosmological setting using the adaptive mesh refinement code,
Enzo, and study the kinematics of gas in the simulated galactic halo. We find
that the gas inflow occurs mostly along filamentary structures in the halo. The
warm-hot (10^5 K < T < 10^6 K) and hot (T > 10^6 K) ionized gases are found to
dominate the overall mass accretion in the system (with dM/dt = 3-5 M_solar/yr)
over a large range of distances, extending from the virial radius to the
vicinity of the disk. Most of the inflowing gas (by mass) does not cool, and
the small fraction that manages to cool does so primarily close to the galaxy
(R <~ 20 kpc), perhaps comprising the neutral gas that may be detectable as,
e.g., high-velocity clouds. The neutral clouds are embedded within larger,
accreting filamentary flows, and represent only a small fraction of the total
mass inflow rate. The inflowing gas has relatively low metallicity (Z/Z_solar <
0.2). The outer layers of the filamentary inflows are heated due to compression
as they approach the disk. In addition to the inflow, we find high-velocity,
metal-enriched outflows of hot gas driven by supernova feedback. Our results
are consistent with observations of halo gas at low z.
