Dark matter halos and evolution of bars in disk galaxies: Varying gas fraction and gas spatial resolution

We conduct numerical experiments by evolving gaseous/stellar disks embedded in live dark matter halos aiming at quantifying the effect of gas spatial resolution and gas content on the bar evolution. Three model sequences have been constructed using different resolutions, and the gas fraction has been varied along each sequence within the range of f_g = 0%-50%, but keeping the disk and halo properties unchanged. We find that the spatial resolution becomes important with an increase in the gas content. For the higher resolution model sequences, we observe a bimodal behavior in the bar evolution with respect to the gas fraction, especially during the secular phase of this evolution. The switch from the gas-poor to gas-rich behavior is abrupt and depends on the resolution used, being reasonably confined to f_g ∼ 5%-12%. The diverging evolution has been observed in nearly all basic parameters characterizing bars, such as the bar strength, central mass concentration, bar vertical buckling amplitude, bar size, etc. We find that the presence of the gas component severely limits the bar growth and affects its pattern speed evolution. Gas-poor models display rapidly decelerating bars, while gas-rich models exhibit bars with constant or even slowly accelerating tumbling. We also find that the gas-rich models have bar corotation (CR) radii within the disk at all times, in contrast with gaspoor and purely stellar disks. In addition, the CR-to-bar size ratio is less than 2 for gas-rich models. Next, we have confirmed that the disk angular momentum within the CR remains unchanged in the gas-poor models, as long as the CR stays within the disk, but experiences a sharp drop before leveling off in the gas-rich models. Finally, we discuss a number of observed correlations between various parameters of simulated bars, such as between the bar sizes and the gas fractions, between the bar strength and the buckling amplitude, and between the bar strength and its size, etc.