SimpleX2: radiative transfer on an unstructured, dynamic grid

TL;DR

SimpleX2 is an improved radiative transfer method on unstructured grids that enhances accuracy in optically thin regimes, incorporates dynamic grid updates, and is optimized for large-scale parallel computations, demonstrating excellent agreement with analytical and other numerical solutions.

Contribution

The paper introduces SimpleX2, a novel version of the radiative transfer method with direction conserving transport and dynamic grid updates for improved accuracy and scalability.

Findings

Accurately transports photons in optically thin regimes.

Maintains high computational speed with parallelization.

Shows excellent agreement with analytical solutions and other codes.

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.