Fully-Coupled Simulation of Cosmic Reionization. I: Numerical Methods and Tests

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully-coupled radiation hydrodynamics simulation method for cosmic reionization, utilizing an implicit flux-limited diffusion approach with scalable solvers, enabling large-volume, high-resolution cosmological modeling.

Contribution

It presents a novel, scalable numerical framework for simulating inhomogeneous reionization with self-consistent radiation and hydrodynamics in large cosmological volumes.

Findings

The method is faster and more robust than previous approaches.

FLD's shadowing limitations have minor effects on reionization outcomes.

The approach successfully models reionization in an 80 Mpc volume with high resolution.

Abstract

We describe an extension of the Enzo code to enable fully-coupled radiation hydrodynamical simulation of inhomogeneous reionization in large $\sim (100 Mpc)^3$ cosmological volumes with thousands to millions of point sources. We solve all dynamical, radiative transfer, thermal, and ionization processes self-consistently on the same mesh, as opposed to a postprocessing approach which coarse-grains the radiative transfer. We do, however, employ a simple subgrid model for star formation which we calibrate to observations. Radiation transport is done in the grey flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation, which is solved by implicit time integration split off from the gas energy and ionization equations, which are solved separately. This results in a faster and more robust scheme for cosmological applications compared to the earlier method. The FLD equation is solved using the hypre optimally scalable geometric multigrid solver from LLNL. By treating the ionizing radiation as a grid field as opposed to rays, our method is scalable with respect to the number of ionizing sources, limited only by the parallel scaling properties of the radiation solver. We test the speed and accuracy of our approach on a number of standard verification and validation tests. We show by direct comparison with Enzo's adaptive ray tracing method Moray that the well-known inability of FLD to cast a shadow behind opaque clouds has a minor effect on the evolution of ionized volume and mass fractions in a reionization simulation validation test. We illustrate an application of our method to the problem of inhomogeneous reionization in a 80 Mpc comoving box resolved with $3200^3$ Eulerian grid cells and dark matter particles.