C^2-Ray: A new method for photon-conserving transport of ionizing radiation

Abstract

We present a new numerical method for calculating the transfer of ionizing radiation, called C^2-Ray=Conservative, Causal Ray-tracing method. The method is explicitly photon-conserving, so the depletion of ionizing photons by bound-free opacity is guaranteed to equal the photoionizations these photons caused. As a result, grid cells can be large and very optically-thick without loss of accuracy. The method also uses an analytical relaxation solution for the ionization rate equations for each time step which can accommodate time steps which greatly exceed the characteristic ionization and ionization front crossing times. Together, these features make it possible to integrate the equation of transfer along a ray with many fewer cells and time steps than previous methods. For multi-dimensional calculations, the code utilizes short-characteristics ray tracing. C^2-Ray is well-suited for coupling radiative transfer to gas and N-body dynamics methods, on both fixed and adaptive grids, without imposing additional limitations on the time step and grid spacing. We present several tests of the code involving propagation of ionization fronts in one and three dimensions, in both homogeneous and inhomogeneous density fields. We compare to analytical solutions for the ionization front position and velocity, some of which we derive here for the first time.