General purpose ray-tracing and polarized radiative transfer in General Relativity

TL;DR

This paper introduces Arcmancer, a versatile C++ and Python library for general relativistic ray-tracing and polarized radiative transfer, enabling detailed simulations of compact object emissions.

Contribution

The paper presents Arcmancer, a novel, user-friendly, and highly flexible library supporting complex geometries and polarization, with demonstrated applications in accretion disks, neutron stars, and black hole lensing.

Findings

Polarization reveals inner disk geometry details.

Rotation affects polarized light curves at >1% accuracy.

Black hole lensing produces characteristic flux and polarization signatures.

Abstract

Ray-tracing is a central tool for constructing mock observations of compact object emission and for comparing physical emission models with observations. We present Arcmancer, a publicly available general ray-tracing and tensor algebra library, written in C++ and providing a Python interface. Arcmancer supports Riemannian and semi-Riemannian spaces of any dimension and metric, and has novel features such as support for multiple simultaneous coordinate charts, embedded geometric shapes, local coordinate systems and automatic parallel propagation. The Arcmancer interface is extensively documented and user-friendly. While these capabilities make the library well suited for a large variety of problems in numerical geometry, the main focus of this paper is in general relativistic polarized radiative transfer. The accuracy of the code is demonstrated in several code tests and in a comparison with GRTRANS, an existing ray-tracing code. We then use the library in several scenarios as a way to showcase the wide applicability of the code. We study a thin variable-geometry accretion disk model, and find that polarization carries information of the inner disk opening angle. Next, we study rotating neutron stars and determine that to obtain polarized light curves at better than $\sim1\%$ level of accuracy, the rotation needs to be taken into account both in the space-time metric as well as in the shape of the star. Finally, we investigate the observational signatures of an accreting black hole lensed by an orbiting black hole. We find that these systems exhibit a characteristic asymmetric twin-peak profile both in flux and polarization properties.