TRAPHIC - Radiative Transfer for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations

TL;DR

TRAPHIC is a new adaptive radiative transfer scheme for SPH simulations that efficiently handles many light sources and complex geometries, improving accuracy and scalability in astrophysical modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel photon-guiding and source merging approach for efficient, accurate radiative transfer in SPH simulations, suitable for large-scale parallel computing.

Findings

Excellent agreement with analytic solutions

Comparable or improved performance over existing codes

Effective handling of multiple light sources and complex geometries

Abstract

We present TRAPHIC, a novel radiative transfer scheme for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. TRAPHIC is designed for use in simulations exhibiting a wide dynamic range in physical length scales and containing a large number of light sources. It is adaptive both in space and in angle and can be employed for application on distributed memory machines. The commonly encountered computationally expensive scaling with the number of light sources in the simulation is avoided by introducing a source merging procedure. The (time-dependent) radiative transfer equation is solved by tracing individual photon packets in an explicitly photon-conserving manner directly on the unstructured grid traced out by the set of SPH particles. To accomplish directed transport of radiation despite the irregular spatial distribution of the SPH particles, photons are guided inside cones. We present and test a parallel numerical implementation of TRAPHIC in the SPH code GADGET-2, specified for the transport of mono-chromatic hydrogen-ionizing radiation. The results of the tests are in excellent agreement with both analytic solutions and results obtained with other state-of-the-art radiative transfer codes.