A simple model for molecular hydrogen chemistry coupled to radiation hydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper presents a new model integrating non-equilibrium molecular hydrogen chemistry into a radiation hydrodynamics code, enabling detailed tracking of H2 formation, destruction, and shielding effects in astrophysical simulations.

Contribution

The authors develop and validate the first local self-shielding model for H2 within a moment-based radiative transfer framework, enhancing simulation accuracy.

Findings

Successfully reproduces molecular-atomic hydrogen transition depth

Accurately models molecular cooling and Stromgren sphere in molecular medium

Demonstrates model's effectiveness compared to specialized PDR codes

Abstract

We introduce non-equilibrium molecular hydrogen chemistry into the radiation hydrodynamics code Ramses-RT. This is an adaptive mesh refinement grid code with radiation hydrodynamics that couples the thermal chemistry of hydrogen and helium to moment-based radiative transfer with the Eddington tensor closure model. The H2 physics that we include are formation on dust grains, gas phase formation, formation by three-body collisions, collisional destruction, photodissociation, photoionization, cosmic ray ionization, and self-shielding. In particular, we implement the first model for H2 self-shielding that is tied locally to moment-based radiative transfer by enhancing photodestruction. This self-shielding from Lyman-Werner line overlap is critical to H2 formation and gas cooling. We can now track the non-equilibrium evolution of molecular, atomic, and ionized hydrogen species with their corresponding dissociating and ionizing photon groups. Over a series of tests we show that our model works well compared to specialized photodissociation region codes. We successfully reproduce the transition depth between molecular and atomic hydrogen, molecular cooling of the gas, and a realistic Stromgren sphere embedded in a molecular medium. In this paper we focus on test cases to demonstrate the validity of our model on small scales. Our ultimate goal is to implement this in large-scale galactic simulations.