A Fast, Parallelized, GPU-Accelerated Photochemical Model, XODIAC, with Built-in Equilibrium Chemistry and Multiple Chemical Networks for Exoplanetary Atmospheres

TL;DR

XODIAC is a GPU-accelerated, flexible photochemical model for exoplanet atmospheres, enabling rapid, comparative studies with multiple chemical networks and validated against existing models on hot Jupiter data.

Contribution

The paper introduces XODIAC, a novel, fast, GPU-based photochemical model with built-in equilibrium chemistry and multiple networks, including a new comprehensive C-H-O-N-P-S-Metals network.

Findings

XODIAC shows excellent agreement with established models on HD 189733 b.

Chemical network choice affects phosphorus chemistry most significantly.

Benchmarking confirms numerical scheme consistency across models.

Abstract

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has delivered high-quality atmospheric observations and expanded the known chemical inventory of exoplanetary atmospheres, opening new avenues for atmospheric chemistry modeling to interpret these data. Here, we present XODIAC, a fast, GPU-accelerated, one-dimensional photochemical model with a built-in equilibrium chemistry solver, an updated thermochemical database, and three chemical reaction networks. This framework enables comparative atmospheric chemistry studies, including the newly developed XODIAC-2025 network, a state-of-the-art C-H-O-N-P-S-Metals network, linking 594 species through 7,720 reactions. The other two are existing, publicly available C-H-O-N-S and C-H-O-N-S-Metals networks, from the established photochemical models VULCAN and ARGO, respectively, which are commonly used in the community. The XODIAC model has been rigorously benchmarked on the well-studied hot Jupiter HD 189733 b, with results compared against these two models. Benchmarking shows excellent agreement and demonstrates that, when the same chemical network and initial conditions are used, the numerical scheme for solving atmospheric chemistry does not significantly affect the results. We also revisited the atmospheric chemistry of HD 189733 b and performed a comparative analysis across the three networks. Sulfur chemistry shows the least variation across networks, carbon chemistry shows slightly more, and phosphorus chemistry varies the most, primarily due to the introduction of unique PHO and PN pathways comprising 390 reactions in the XODIAC-2025 network. These findings highlight XODIAC's capability to advance exoplanetary atmospheric chemistry and provide a robust framework for comparative exoplanetology.