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Title: Fully coupled simulation of cosmic reionization. I. numerical methods and tests

Journal Article · · The Astrophysical Journal. Supplement Series (Online)
 [1];  [2];  [1];  [3];  [4]
  1. Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States)
  2. Southern Methodist Univ., Dallas, TX (United States)
  3. Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States); Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  4. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

Here, we describe an extension of the Enzo code to enable fully coupled radiation hydrodynamical simulation of inhomogeneous reionization in large similar to(100 Mpc)(3) cosmological volumes with thousands to millions of point sources. We solve all dynamical, radiative transfer, thermal, and ionization processes self-consistently on the same mesh, as opposed to a postprocessing approach which coarse-grains the radiative transfer. But, we employ a simple subgrid model for star formation which we calibrate to observations. The numerical method presented is a modification of an earlier method presented in Reynolds et al. differing principally in the operator splitting algorithm we use to advance the system of equations. Radiation transport is done in the gray flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation, which is solved by implicit time integration split off from the gas energy and ionization equations, which are solved separately. This results in a faster and more robust scheme for cosmological applications compared to the earlier method. The FLD equation is solved using the hypre optimally scalable geometric multigrid solver from LLNL. By treating the ionizing radiation as a grid field as opposed to rays, our method is scalable with respect to the number of ionizing sources, limited only by the parallel scaling properties of the radiation solver. We test the speed and accuracy of our approach on a number of standard verification and validation tests. We show by direct comparison with Enzo's adaptive ray tracing method Moray that the well-known inability of FLD to cast a shadow behind opaque clouds has a minor effect on the evolution of ionized volume and mass fractions in a reionization simulation validation test. Finally, we illustrate an application of our method to the problem of inhomogeneous reionization in a 80 Mpc comoving box resolved with 3200(3) Eulerian grid cells and dark matter particles.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); National Science Foundation (NSF)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725; AST-0808184; AST-1109243
OSTI ID:
1286996
Journal Information:
The Astrophysical Journal. Supplement Series (Online), Vol. 216, Issue 1; ISSN 1538-4365
Publisher:
American Astronomical Society/IOPCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 30 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (10)

Lyman α radiation hydrodynamics of galactic winds before cosmic reionization journal October 2016
Inhomogeneous reionization models in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations journal May 2019
Challenges and Techniques for Simulating Line Emission journal September 2018
Self-consistent Modeling of Reionization in Cosmological Hydrodynamical Simulations journal March 2017
Magnetohydrodynamical Effects on Nuclear Deflagration Fronts in Type Ia Supernovae journal April 2018
Fully Coupled Simulation of Cosmic Reionization. III. Stochastic Early Reionization by the Smallest Galaxies journal October 2018
Self-Consistent Modeling of Reionization in Cosmological Hydrodynamical Simulations text January 2016
Lyman-alpha radiation hydrodynamics of galactic winds before cosmic reionization text January 2016
Magneto-Hydrodynamical Effects on Nuclear Deflagration Fronts in Type Ia Supernovae text January 2017
Inhomogeneous Reionization Models in Cosmological Hydrodynamical Simulations text January 2018

Figures / Tables (24)

TABLE 1(p. 9)table TABLE 1
Fig. 1.(p. 12)figure Fig. 1.
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Fig. 21.(p. 28)figure Fig. 21.
Fig. 22.(p. 28)figure Fig. 22.
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Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
cosmology: theory
methods: numerical
radiative transfer
ADAPTIVE MESH REFINEMENT
COSMOLOGICAL RADIATIVE-TRANSFER
PROBE WMAP OBSERVATIONS
FLUX-LIMITED DIFFUSION
PIECEWISE PARABOLIC METHOD
POPULATION-III STARS
HYDROGEN REIONIZATION
INTERGALACTIC ME