NICIL: A stand alone library to self-consistently calculate non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic coefficients in molecular cloud cores

TL;DR

Nicil is a versatile, stand-alone Fortran90 library that calculates ionisation and non-ideal MHD coefficients in molecular cloud cores, enabling customizable simulations of magnetic effects in astrophysical environments.

Contribution

It introduces Nicil, a flexible, parameterized library for computing ionisation and non-ideal MHD coefficients, including cosmic ray and thermal ionisation processes.

Findings

Successfully tested the module in various scenarios

Demonstrated integration into existing numerical codes

Provides detailed ionisation and MHD coefficients for molecular clouds

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Nicil: Non-Ideal magnetohydrodynamics Coefficients and Ionisation Library. Nicil is a stand-alone Fortran90 module that calculates the ionisation values and the coefficients of the non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics terms of Ohmic resistivity, the Hall effect, and ambipolar diffusion. The module is fully parameterised such that the user can decide which processes to include and decide upon the values of the free parameters, making this a versatile and customisable code. The module includes both cosmic ray and thermal ionisation; the former includes two ion species and three species of dust grains (positively charged, negatively charged and neutral), and the latter includes five elements which can be doubly ionised. We demonstrate tests of the module, and then describe how to implement it into an existing numerical code.