Collision between molecular clouds - I. The effect of the cloud virial ratio in head-on collisions

In a series of papers, we investigate the effect of collisions between turbulent molecular clouds on their structure, evolution, and star formation activity. In this paper, we look into the role of the clouds' initial virial ratios. Three different scenarios were examined: both clouds initially bound, one cloud bound and one unbound, and both clouds initially unbound. Models in which one or both clouds are bound generate filamentary structures aligned along the collision axis and discernible in position-position and position-velocity space. If neither cloud is bound, no filaments result. Unlike in previous simulations of collisions between smooth clouds, owing to the substructure created in the clouds by turbulence before the collisions, dissipation of kinetic energy by the collision is very inefficient and in none of our simulations is sufficient bulk kinetic energy lost to render the clouds bound. Simulations where both clouds are bound created twice as much stellar mass than the bound-unbound model, and both these scenarios produced much more stellar mass than the simulation in which both clouds are unbound. Each simulation was also compared with a control run in which the clouds do not collide. We find the bound-bound collision increases the overall star formation efficiency by a factor of approximately two relative to the control, but that the bound-unbound collision produces a much smaller increase, and the collision has very little effect on the unbound-unbound cloud collision.