Smoothed Particle Radiation Hydrodynamics: Two-Moment method with Local Eddington Tensor Closure

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new SPH-based radiative transfer method (SPH-M1RT) that efficiently models radiation in astrophysical simulations, handling multiple sources and regimes with improved stability and accuracy.

Contribution

The paper develops a coupled SPH-M1RT method with a modified M1 closure, anisotropic viscosity, and high-order diffusion, enabling accurate radiation transport in diverse regimes.

Findings

Successfully applied to standard cosmological radiative transfer tests.

Handles numerous ionising sources efficiently without increased computational cost.

Demonstrates robustness across optically thin and thick regimes.

Abstract

We present a new radiative transfer method (SPH-M1RT) that is coupled dynamically with smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). We implement it in the (task-based parallel) SWIFT galaxy simulation code but it can be straightforwardly implemented in other SPH codes. Our moment-based method simultaneously solves the radiation energy and flux equations in SPH, making it adaptive in space and time. We modify the M1 closure relation to stabilize radiation fronts in the optically thin limit. We also introduce anisotropic artificial viscosity and high-order artificial diffusion schemes, which allow the code to handle radiation transport accurately in both the optically thin and optically thick regimes. Non-equilibrium thermo-chemistry is solved using a semi-implicit sub-cycling technique. The computational cost of our method is independent of the number of sources and can be lowered further by using the reduced speed of light approximation. We demonstrate the robustness of our method by applying it to a set of standard tests from the cosmological radiative transfer comparison project of Iliev et al. The SPH-M1RT scheme is well-suited for modelling situations in which numerous sources emit ionising radiation, such as cosmological simulations of galaxy formation or simulations of the interstellar medium.