SimpleX2: radiative transfer on an unstructured, dynamic grid

Abstract

We present an improved version of the SimpleX method for radiative transfer on an unstructured Delaunay grid. The grid samples the medium through which photons are transported in an optimal way for fast radiative transfer calculations. In this paper we study the detailed working of SimpleX in test problems and show improvements over the previous version of the method. We have applied a direction conserving transport scheme that correctly transports photons in the optically thin regime, a regime where the original SimpleX algorithm lost its accuracy. In addition, a scheme of dynamic grid updates is employed to ensure correct photon transport when the optical depth changes during a simulation. For the application to large data sets, the method is parallellised for distributed memory machines using MPI. To test the new method, we have performed standard tests for cosmological radiative transfer. We show excellent correspondence with both the analytical solution (when available) and to the results of other codes compared to the former version of SimpleX, without sacrificing the benefits of the high computational speed of the method.

17 pages, 20 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (8)

• E pur si muove: Galiliean-invariant cosmological hydrodynamical simulations on a moving mesh
• Radiative transfer simulations of cosmic reionization I: methodology and initial results
• Cosmological Radiative Transfer Codes Comparison Project I: The Static Density Field Tests
• TRAPHIC - Radiative Transfer for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations
• CRASH2: colored packets and other updates
• The Diffuse Nature of Stromgren Spheres
• Transport on Adaptive Random Lattices
• Mathematical properties of the SimpleX algorithm

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