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URCHIN: a reverse ray tracer for astrophysical applications

Altay, G.; Theuns, T.

URCHIN: a reverse ray tracer for astrophysical applications Thumbnail


Authors

G. Altay



Abstract

We describe URCHIN, a reverse ray-tracing radiative transfer scheme optimized to model self-shielding from the post-reionization ultraviolet (UV) background in cosmological simulations. The reverse ray-tracing strategy provides several benefits over forward ray-tracing codes including: (1) the preservation of adaptive density field resolution; (2) completely uniform sampling of gas elements by rays; (3) the preservation of Galilean invariance; (4) the ability to sample the UV background spectrum with hundreds of frequency bins; and (5) exact preservation of the input UV background spectrum and amplitude in optically thin gas. The implementation described here focuses on smoothed particle hydrodynamics. However, the method can be applied to any density field representation in which resolution elements admit ray intersection tests and can be associated with optical depths. We characterize the errors in our implementation in stages beginning with comparison to known analytic solutions and ending with a realistic model of the z = 3 cosmological UV background incident on to a suite of spherically symmetric models of gaseous galactic haloes.

Citation

Altay, G., & Theuns, T. (2013). URCHIN: a reverse ray tracer for astrophysical applications. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 434(1), 748-764. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stt1067

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Sep 1, 2013
Deposit Date Jan 20, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 434
Issue 1
Pages 748-764
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stt1067
Keywords Radiative transfer, Methods: numerical, Intergalactic medium, Quasars: absorption lines, Diffuse radiation, Ultraviolet: general.

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2013 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.





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