Comparing Moment-Based and Monte Carlo Methods of Radiation Transport Modeling for Type II-Plateau Supernova Light Curves

TL;DR

This study compares two radiation transport methods, moment-based and Monte Carlo, in modeling supernova light curves, finding they produce consistent results and validating the efficiency of the moment-based approach.

Contribution

It provides a systematic comparison of two radiation transport codes for supernova modeling, demonstrating their agreement and assessing the efficiency of the moment-based method.

Findings

Both codes produce remarkably similar light curves and ejecta structures.

Monte Carlo moments verify the accuracy of the moment-based scheme.

Opacity table resolutions have minimal impact on results.

Abstract

Time-dependent electromagnetic signatures from core-collapse supernovae are the result of detailed transport of the shock-deposited and radioactively-powered radiation through the stellar ejecta. Due to the complexity of the underlying radiative processes, considerable approximations are made to simplify key aspects of the radiation transport problem. We present a systematic comparison of the moment-based radiation hydrodynamical code STELLA and the Monte Carlo radiation transport code Sedona in the 1D modeling of Type II-Plateau supernovae. Based on explosion models generated from the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) instrument, we find remarkable agreements in the modeled light curves and the ejecta structure thermal evolution, affirming the fidelity of both radiation transport modeling approaches. The radiative moments computed directly by the Monte Carlo scheme in Sedona also verify the accuracy of the moment-based scheme. We find that the coarse resolutions of the opacity tables and the numerical approximations in STELLA have insignificant impact on the resulting bolometric light curves, making it an efficient tool for the specific task of optical light curve modeling.