SuperSNEC: Fast and Accurate Light Curve Production for Large Hydrodynamic Model Grids Using Adaptive Gridding

TL;DR

SuperSNEC is a rapid, adaptive gridding-based extension of SNEC that produces accurate supernova light curves with significantly reduced computation time, enabling large model grid generation.

Contribution

It introduces adaptive gridding and solver optimizations to produce accurate light curves using only 100 zones, achieving over 420 times faster runtimes than high-resolution models.

Findings

100-zone models achieve RMS residual of 0.022 mag

Runtime per model is less than 2 seconds

Accurately reproduces observed supernova light curves

Abstract

We present SuperSNEC, an accelerated version of the SuperNova Explosion Code (SNEC) designed for rapid production of large radiation-hydrodynamic model grids using low-zone-count simulations ($\sim100$ zones). The main advance is adaptive gridding of the computational grid, which preserves light-curve fidelity relative to a high-resolution SNEC baseline ($\sim1000$ zones) while delivering a runtime improvement of ${\sim}420\times$. SuperSNEC also includes solver optimizations, optimized radioactive-energy deposition and ray-tracing, improved $^{56}$Ni mixing controls, and a smooth photosphere luminosity correction that suppresses low-resolution artifacts. We quantify the speed-accuracy trade-off for a 100-zone configuration against a 1000-zone reference and define baseline settings for efficient large-grid inference of stripped-envelope supernovae. Our optimized 100-zone setup achieves an RMS light-curve residual of $0.022$ mag relative to the 1000-zone reference, at a runtime of $<2$ seconds per model. Applied to SN 2011dh (Type IIb), SN~1993J (Type IIb), and SN 2020oi (Type Ic), SuperSNEC recovers light-curve parameters consistent with the literature; in particular, SN 2020oi is well reproduced by a purely radioactive model, with no clear evidence that an additional power source is required.