Dispersal of Molecular Clouds by UV Radiation Feedback from Massive Stars

We report the results of three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic simulations of star cluster formation in turbulent molecular clouds, with primary attention to how stellar radiation feedback controls the lifetime and net star formation efficiency (SFE) of their natal clouds. We examine the combined effects of photoionization and radiation pressure for a wide range of cloud masses (10^4 - 10^6 Msun) and radii (2 - 80 pc). In all simulations, stars form in densest regions of filaments until feedback becomes strong enough to clear the remaining gas out of the system. We find that the SFE is primarily a function of the initial cloud surface density, Sigma, (SFE increasing from ~7% to ~50% as Sigma increases from ~30 Msun/pc^2 to ~10^3 Msun/pc^2), with weak dependence on the initial cloud mass. Control runs with the same initial conditions but without either radiation pressure or photoionization show that photoionization is the dominant feedback mechanism for clouds typical in normal disk galaxies, while they are equally important for more dense, compact clouds. For low-Sigma clouds, more than 80% of the initial cloud mass is lost by photoevaporation flows off the surface of dense clumps. The cloud becomes unbound within ~0.5-2.5 initial free-fall times after the first star-formation event, implying that cloud dispersal is rapid once massive star formation takes place. We briefly discuss implications and limitations of our work in relation to observations.