MOCMC: Method of Characteristics Moment Closure, a Numerical Method for Covariant Radiation Magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract

We present a conservative numerical method for radiation magnetohydrodynamics with frequency-dependent full transport in stationary spacetimes. This method is stable and accurate for both large and small optical depths and radiation pressures. The radiation stress-energy tensor is evolved in flux-conservative form, and closed with a swarm of samples that each transport a multigroup representation of the invariant specific intensity along a null geodesic. In each zone, the enclosed samples are used to efficiently construct a Delaunay triangulation of the unit sphere in the comoving frame, which in turn is used to calculate the Eddington tensor, average source terms, and adaptively refine the sample swarm. Radiation four-fources are evaluated in the moment sector in a semi-implicit fashion. The radiative transfer equation is solved in invariant form deterministically for each sample. Since each sample carries a discrete representation of the full spectrum, the cost of evaluating the transport operator is independent of the number of frequency groups, representing a significant reduction of algorithmic complexity for transport in frequency dependent problems. The major approximation we make in this work is performing scattering in an angle-averaged way, with Compton scattering further approximated by the Kompaneets equation. Local adaptivity in samples also makes this scheme more amenable to nonuniform meshes than a traditional Monte Carlo method. We describe the method and present results on a suite of test problems. We find that MOCMC converges at least as $\sim N^{-1}$, rather than the canonical Monte Carlo $N^{-1/2}$, where $N$ is the number of samples per zone. On several problems we demonstrate substantial improvement over Eddington and M1 closures and gray opacities.

26 pages, 17 figures, submitted to ApJS

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• A New Moment-Based General-Relativistic Neutrino-Radiation Transport Code: Methods and First Applications to Neutron Star Mergers