Convergence of SPH and AMR simulations

We present the first results of a large suite of convergence tests between Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) Finite Difference Hydrodynamics and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the non-linear thin shell instability and the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. We find that the two methods converge in the limit of high resolution and accuracy. AMR and SPH simulations of the non-linear thin shell instability converge with each other with standard algorithms and parameters. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in SPH requires both an artificial conductivity term and a kernel with larger compact support and more neighbours (e.g. the quintic kernel) in order converge with AMR. For purely hydrodynamical problems, SPH simulations take an order of magnitude longer than the grid code when converged.