Radiation transport methods in star formation simulations

Abstract

Radiation transport plays a crucial role in star formation models, as certain questions within this field cannot be accurately addressed without taking it into account. Given the high complexity of the interstellar medium from which stars form, numerical simulations are frequently employed to model the star formation process. This study reviews recent methods for incorporating radiation transport into star formation simulations, discussing them in terms of the used algorithms, treatment of radiation frequency dependence, the interaction of radiation with the gas, and the parallelization of methods for deployment on supercomputers. Broadly, the algorithms fall into two categories: (i) moment-based methods, encompassing the flux-limited diffusion approximation, M1 closure, and variable Eddington tensor methods, and (ii) methods directly solving the radiation transport equation, including forward and reverse ray tracing, characteristics-based methods, and Monte Carlo techniques. Beyond discussing advantages and disadvantages of these methods, the review also lists recent radiation hydrodynamic codes implemented the described methods.

22 pages, accepted by Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences

References in corpus (31)

• The RAGE radiation-hydrodynamic code
• Simulating the formation of molecular clouds. I. Slow formation by gravitational collapse from static initial conditions
• Cosmological Radiative Transfer Codes Comparison Project I: The Static Density Field Tests
• A scheme for radiation pressure and photon diffusion with the M1 closure in RAMSES-RT
• Semi-implicit scheme for treating radiation under M1 closure in general relativistic conservative fluid dynamics codes
• Fragmentation of gravitationally unstable gaseous protoplanetary disks with radiative transfer
• Radiative transfer and the energy equation in SPH simulations of star formation
• Equations and Algorithms for Mixed Frame Flux-Limited Diffusion Radiation Hydrodynamics
• A radiative transfer scheme for cosmological reionization based on a local Eddington tensor
• TRAPHIC - Radiative Transfer for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations
• The statistical properties of stars and their dependence on metallicity
• Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations of expanding HII regions. I. Numerical methods and tests
• An implementation of radiative transfer in the cosmological simulation code GADGET
• Tree-based solvers for adaptive mesh refinement code FLASH - I: gravity and optical depths
• Monte Carlo Radiation Hydrodynamics with Implicit Methods
• SPHRAY: A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Ray Tracer for Radiative Transfer
• An Implicit Finite Volume Scheme to Solve the Time Dependent Radiation Transport Equation Based on Discrete Ordinates
• 3D Radiative Hydrodynamics for Disk Stability Simulations: A Proposed Testing Standard and New Results
• Hybrid Adaptive Ray-Moment Method (HARM${}^2$): A Highly Parallel Method for Radiation Hydrodynamics on Adaptive Grids
• Combining radiative transfer and diffuse interstellar medium physics to model star formation
• A radiative transfer module for relativistic magnetohydrodynamics in the PLUTO code
• A general hybrid radiation transport scheme for star formation simulations on an adaptive grid
• Transport on Adaptive Random Lattices
• Tree-based solvers for adaptive mesh refinement code FLASH -- II: radiation transport module TreeRay
• An implicit method for radiative transfer with the diffusion approximation in SPH
• Radiation hydrodynamics including irradiation and adaptive mesh refinement with AZEuS. I. Methods
• 3D Radiative Transfer in $\eta$ Carinae: Application of the SimpleX Algorithm to 3D SPH Simulations of Binary Colliding Winds
• PION: Simulating bow shocks and circumstellar nebulae
• TREVR: A general $Nlo{g}^{2}N$ radiative transfer algorithm
• A fast tree-based method for estimating column densities in Adaptive Mesh Refinement codes Influence of UV radiation field on the structure of molecular clouds
• A high-performance and portable asymptotic preserving radiation hydrodynamics code with the M1 model