A 3D radiative transfer framework: III. periodic boundary conditions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive 3D radiative transfer framework with periodic boundary conditions, employing operator splitting and parallelization, validated against 1D tests for accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a novel 3D radiative transfer method incorporating scattering, operator splitting, and parallel computing, extending previous models to periodic boundary conditions.

Findings

3D results closely match 1D benchmark tests

The method effectively handles scattering in lines and continuum

Parallelized code improves computational efficiency

Abstract

We present a general method to solve radiative transfer problems including scattering in the continuum as well as in lines in 3D configurations with periodic boundary conditions. he scattering problem for line transfer is solved via means of an operator splitting (OS) technique. The formal solution is based on a full characteristics method. The approximate $\Lambda$ operator is constructed considering nearest neighbors exactly. The code is parallelized over both wavelength and solid angle using the MPI library. We present the results of several test cases with different values of the thermalization parameter and two choices for the temperature structure. The results are directly compared to 1D plane parallel tests. The 3D results agree very well with the well-tested 1D calculations.