Blacklight: A General-Relativistic Ray-Tracing and Analysis Tool

TL;DR

Blacklight is a versatile, high-performance tool for post-processing general-relativistic MHD simulation data, enabling detailed analysis and visualization including polarized ray tracing and adaptive features.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, high-performance code capable of advanced analysis and visualization of simulation data with features like adaptive mesh support and slow-light calculations.

Findings

Supports polarized ray tracing of synchrotron radiation

Provides auxiliary data maps and false-color renderings

Supports adaptive mesh refinement and slow-light calculations

Abstract

We describe the Blacklight code, intended for post-processing general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulation data. Beyond polarized ray tracing of synchrotron radiation, it can produce a number of outputs that aid in analyzing data sets, such as maps of auxiliary quantities and false-color renderings. Additional features include support for adaptive mesh refinement input, slow-light calculations, and adaptive ray tracing. The code is written with ease of use, readability, and transparency as primary objectives, while it still achieves high performance. Blacklight is publicly available and released into the public domain.