SPHM1 RT¶

SPHM1RT is the first two-moment radiative transfer on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (Chan et al. 2021). It solves the radiation energy and flux equations with a modified Eddington tensor closure. It is adaptive, efficient, and easy to parallelize.

Warning

The radiative transfer schemes are still in development and are not useable at this moment. This page is currently a placeholder to document new features and requirements as the code grows.

Compiling for SPHM1-RT¶

To compile swift to be able to run with SPHM1-RT, you need to configure with --with-rt=SPHM1RT_N where N is the integer number of photon groups that you intend to use in your simulation.
SPHM1-RT is compatible with any SPH scheme. You’ll need to compile using --with-hydro=sphenix or other SPH schemes, e.g. we have tested gadget2, minimal, and sphenix.

Runtime Parameters¶

You need to provide the following runtime parameters in the yaml file:

SPHM1RT:
    cred: 2.99792458e10                                 # value of reduced speed of light for the RT solver in code unit
    CFL_condition: 0.1                                  # CFL condition for RT, independent of hydro
    chi:  [0, 0, 0]                                     # (Optional) initial opacity in code unit for all gas particles
    photon_groups_Hz: [3.288e15, 5.945e15, 13.157e15]   # Photon frequency group bin edges in Hz.
    use_const_emission_rates: 1                         # (Optional) use constant emission rates for stars as defined with star_emission_rates_erg_LSol parameter
    star_emission_rates_LSol: [1e-32, 1e-32, 1e-32]     # (Optional) constant star emission rates for each photon frequency group to use if use_constant_emission_rates is set.
    stellar_spectrum_type: 0                            # Which radiation spectrum to use. 0: constant from 0 until some max frequency set by stellar_spectrum_const_max_frequency_Hz. 1: blackbody spectrum.
    stellar_spectrum_const_max_frequency_Hz: 1.e17      # (Conditional) if stellar_spectrum_type=0, use this maximal frequency for the constant spectrum.
    stars_max_timestep: -1.                             # (Optional) restrict the maximal timestep of stars to this value (in internal units). Set to negative to turn off.

The photon_groups_Hz need to be N - 1 frequency edges (floats) to separate the spectrum into N groups. The outer limits of zero and infinity are assumed.

At the moment, the only way to define star emission rates is to use constant star emission rates that need to be provided in the parameter file. The star emission rates need to be defined for each photon frequency group individually. The first entry of the array is for the photon group with frequency [0, <first entry of photon_groups_Hz>). Each star particle will then emit the given energies, independent of their other properties.

Furthermore, even though the parameter use_const_emission_rates is intended to be optional in the future, for now it needs to be set to 1., and it requires you to manually set the stellar emission rates via the star_emission_rates_LSol parameter.

When solving the thermochemistry, we need to assume some form of stellar spectrum so we may integrate over frequency bins to obtain average interaction rates. The parameter stellar_spectrum_type is hence required, and allows you to select between:

constant spectrum (stellar_spectrum_type: 0)
- This choice additionally requires you to provide a maximal frequency for the spectrum after which it’ll be cut off via the stellar_spectrum_const_max_frequency_Hz parameter
blackbody spectrum (stellar_spectrum_type: 1)
- In this case, you need to provide also temperature of the blackbody via the stellar_spectrum_blackbody_temperature_K parameter.

Initial Conditions¶

Setting Up Initial Conditions for RT¶

Optionally, you may want to provide initial conditions for the radiation field and/or the mass fraction of the ionizing species. To do so, you need to add the following datasets to the /PartType0 particle group:

PhotonEnergiesGroup1
PhotonEnergiesGroup2
.
.
.
PhotonEnergiesGroupN
PhotonFluxesGroup1
PhotonFluxesGroup2
.
.
.
PhotonFluxesGroupN

The PhotonEnergies* datasets need to have dimension nparts, while the PhotonFluxesGroup* datasets need to have dimension (nparts, 3), where nparts is the number of hydro particles. If you are writing initial conditions where the fields have units, then PhotonEnergies* are expected to have units of energy \([M L^2 T^{-2}]\)), while the PhotonFluxes* fields should be in units of energy times speed, \([M L^3 T^{-3}]\)).

Example using Python and `swiftsimio`¶

If you are using swiftsimio to write the initial condition files, then the easiest way of adding the RT initial conditions is to first use the swiftsimio routines to write a file, then open it up again and write the additional RT fields again using h5py routines.

Here is an example:

from swiftsimio import Writer
import unyt
import numpy as np
import h5py

# define unit system to use.
unitsystem = unyt.unit_systems.cgs_unit_system

# number of photon groups
nPhotonGroups = 4

# filename of ICs to be generated
outputfilename = "my_rt_ICs.hdf5"

# open a swiftsimio.Writer object
w = Writer(...)

# do your IC setup for gas, gravity etc now
# ...

# write the IC file without doing anything RT related.
w.write(outputfilename)

# Now open file back up again and add RT data.
F = h5py.File(outputfilename, "r+")
header = F["Header"]
nparts = header.attrs["NumPart_ThisFile"][0]
parts = F["/PartType0"]

# Create initial photon energies and fluxes. You can leave them unitless,
# the units have already been written down with w.write(). In this case,
# it's in cgs.
for grp in range(nPhotonGroups):
    dsetname = "PhotonEnergiesGroup{0:d}".format(grp + 1)
    energydata = np.ones((nparts), dtype=np.float32) * some_value_you_want
    parts.create_dataset(dsetname, data=energydata)

    dsetname = "PhotonFluxesGroup{0:d}".format(grp + 1)
    fluxdata = np.zeros((nparts, 3), dtype=np.float32) * some_value_you_want
    parts.create_dataset(dsetname, data=fluxdata)

# close up, and we're done!
F.close()