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We describe a photon-conserving radiative transfer algorithm, using a spatially-adaptive ray-tracing scheme, and its parallel implementation into the adaptive mesh refinement cosmological hydrodynamics code enzo. By coupling the solver with the energy equation and non-equilibrium chemistry network, our radiation hydrodynamics framework can be utilized to study a broad range of astrophysical problems, such as stellar and black hole feedback. Inaccuracies can arise from large time-steps and poor sampling; therefore, we devised an adaptive time-stepping scheme and a fast approximation of the optically-thin radiation field with multiple sources. We test the method with several radiative transfer and radiation hydrodynamics tests that are given in Iliev et al. We further test our method with more dynamical situations, for example, the propagation of an ionization front through a Rayleigh–Taylor instability, time-varying luminosities and collimated radiation. The test suite also includes an expanding H ii region in a magnetized medium, utilizing the newly implemented magnetohydrodynamics module in enzo. This method linearly scales with the number of point sources and number of grid cells. Our implementation is scalable to 512 processors on distributed memory machines and can include the radiation pressure and secondary ionizations from X-ray radiation. It is included in the newest public release of enzo.
Wise et al. (Tue,) studied this question.