Enzo+Moray: Radiation Hydrodynamics Adaptive Mesh Refinement Simulations with Adaptive Ray Tracing

TL;DR

This paper presents Enzo+Moray, a new adaptive mesh refinement radiation hydrodynamics code with an efficient, scalable ray tracing algorithm for astrophysical simulations involving radiation feedback.

Contribution

The paper introduces a photon-conserving, adaptive ray tracing scheme integrated into Enzo, enabling accurate, scalable radiation hydrodynamics simulations with multiple sources and complex physics.

Findings

Successfully tested with various radiative transfer and hydrodynamics scenarios.

Scales linearly with sources and grid cells, efficient on large parallel systems.

Includes advanced physics like radiation pressure and X-ray ionizations.

Abstract

We describe a photon-conserving radiative transfer algorithm, using a spatially-adaptive ray tracing scheme, and its parallel implementation into the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) cosmological hydrodynamics code, Enzo. By coupling the solver with the energy equation and non-equilibrium chemistry network, our radiation hydrodynamics framework can be utilised to study a broad range of astrophysical problems, such as stellar and black hole (BH) feedback. Inaccuracies can arise from large timesteps and poor sampling, therefore we devised an adaptive time-stepping scheme and a fast approximation of the optically-thin radiation field with multiple sources. We test the method with several radiative transfer and radiation hydrodynamics tests that are given in Iliev et al. (2006, 2009). We further test our method with more dynamical situations, for example, the propagation of an ionisation front through a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, time-varying luminosities, and collimated radiation. The test suite also includes an expanding H II region in a magnetised medium, utilising the newly implemented magnetohydrodynamics module in Enzo. This method linearly scales with the number of point sources and number of grid cells. Our implementation is scalable to 512 processors on distributed memory machines and can include radiation pressure and secondary ionisations from X-ray radiation. It is included in the newest public release of Enzo.