Non gravitational heating mechanisms in galaxy clusters

The study of the formation and growth of cosmic structures is one
of the most fascinating and challenging fields of astrophysics. In
the currently favoured cosmological model, the so-called LCDM
cosmogony, dark matter structures grow hierarchically, with small
clumps forming first at very early epochs. The merging of these
dark matter halos in the following evolution leads to the formation
of more massive objects with time, ultimately resulting in a
complex cosmic web composed of filaments of dark matter and
galaxies, rich galaxy clusters, and voids in between. While we have
some knowledge how these dark matter structures evolve with cosmic
time, the relationship between the "dark" and the "luminous"
content of the Universe is still far from being fully understood
and it poses many puzzling questions, both for observational and
theoretical investigations. Galaxy clusters, the largest virialized
objects in the Universe, are especially interesting for
cosmological studies because they are ideal laboratories to study
the physical processes relevant in structure formation, like those
that shape the properties of galaxies, the intergalactic and
intracluster media, and the active galactic nuclei (AGN) that
originate from super-massive black holes (BHs) in cluster centres.
The study of clusters is remarkably promising right now, both
because of the wealth of new data from X-ray telescopes such as
XMM-Newton and Chandra or from optical surveys such as SDSS, and
also due to the increasing power of cosmological simulations as a
theoretical tool. The latter can track the growth of cosmological
structures far into the highly non-linear regime, and have recently
become faithful enough to include for the first time physical
processes such as AGN activity and its effect on galaxy evolution.
Therefore the aim of this Thesis was to incorporate AGN heating
process in fully self-consistent cosmological simulations of
structure formation, and to constrain the relevance of this
feedback mechanism for galaxy and galaxy cluster formation and
evolution.