thornado+Flash-X: A Hybrid DG-IMEX and Finite-Volume Framework for Neutrino-Radiation Hydrodynamics in Core-Collapse Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper introduces thornado+Flash-X, a hybrid neutrino-radiation hydrodynamics framework combining DG-IMEX and finite-volume methods, enabling accurate, efficient, and GPU-accelerated simulations of core-collapse supernovae.

Contribution

It develops a novel hybrid DG-FV neutrino transport scheme with implicit collisional coupling, integrated into the Flash-X framework for multidimensional supernova modeling.

Findings

Verified accuracy with basic transport tests

Demonstrated robustness in spherically symmetric CCSN simulations

Showcased viability of DG-based neutrino transport in multidimensional models

Abstract

We present neutrino-transport algorithms implemented in the toolkit for high-order neutrino-radiation hydrodynamics (thornado) and their coupling to self-gravitating hydrodynamics within the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR)-based multiphysics simulation framework Flash-X. thornado, developed primarily for simulations of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe), employs a spectral, six-species two-moment formulation with algebraic closure and special-relativistic observer corrections accurate to $O(v/c)$, and uses discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for phase-space discretization combined with implicit-explicit time stepping. A key development is a nonlinear neutrino-matter coupling algorithm based on nested fixed-point iteration with Anderson acceleration, enabling fully implicit treatment of collisional processes, including energy-coupling interactions such as neutrino-electron scattering and pair production. Coupling to finite-volume (FV) hydrodynamics is achieved with a hybrid DG-FV representation of the fluid variables and operator-split evolution in Flash-X. The implementation is verified using basic transport tests with idealized opacities and relaxation and deleptonization problems with tabulated microphysics. Spherically symmetric CCSN simulations demonstrate accuracy and robustness of the coupled scheme, including close agreement with the CCSN simulation code Chimera. An axisymmetric CCSN simulation further demonstrates the viability of DG-based neutrino transport for multidimensional supernova modeling within Flash-X. thornado's neutrino-transport solver is GPU-enabled using OpenMP offloading or OpenACC, and all CCSN applications included in this work use the GPU implementation. Together, these results establish a foundation for future enhancements in physics fidelity, numerical algorithms, and computational performance, for increasingly realistic large-scale CCSN simulations.