An Inexact Low-Rank Source Iteration for Steady-State Radiative Transfer Equation with Diffusion Synthetic Acceleration

Abstract

We propose an inexact low-rank source iteration with diffusion synthetic acceleration (SI-DSA) for solving the multidimensional steady-state radiative transfer equation (RTE) in the second-order formulation. The angular flux is represented in either a low-rank matrix or hierarchical Tucker tensor (HTT) format, enabling substantial reductions in computational resources. Each SI step is solved using a preconditioned low-rank conjugate gradient (CG) method with a diffusion preconditioner. To further improve efficiency, we introduce an adaptive inexact strategy that dynamically relaxes the inner CG tolerance during early SI iterations. The method exploits the tensor-product structure of the discretized operators to perform all matrix-vector operations in low-rank form. Numerical experiments on 2D2V benchmark problems, including diffusion-dominated, transport-dominated, and multiscale problems, demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves errors on the order of $10^{-4}$ to $10^{-5}$ relative to full-rank reference solutions, while reducing the degrees of freedom by up to two orders of magnitude. In the diffusion-dominated case, the low-rank solver achieves speedups exceeding $90\times$ over its full-rank counterpart and remains competitive in solving challenging transport-dominated and multiscale problems while providing substantial storage savings. To our knowledge, this work provides the first low-rank SI-DSA framework for multidimensional steady-state RTE.