Engineering topics
Ryan, Benjamin Ransom
Publications and source records attributed to Ryan, Benjamin Ransom.
High-Fidelity Simulations of Objects in Accretion Disks by Coupling REBOUND to a Hydrodynamics Code
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w22_bhmergers FY23 Highlights Viewgraph [Slides]
Observed heavyweight stellar mass black holes require an unknown formation channel; LANL investigating growth inside supermassive black hole accretion disks.
Parthenon: Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Exascale Astrophysics
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$κ$monty: a Monte Carlo Compton scattering code including non-thermal electrons
Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei are strong sources of X-ray emission produced by Compton scattering originating from the accretion flows surrounding their supermassive black holes. The shape and energy of the resulting spectrum depend on the shape of the underlying electron distribution function (DF). In this work, we present an extended version of the GRMONTY code, called ΚMONTY. The GRMONTY code previously only included a thermal Maxwell–Jütner electron DF. We extend the GRMONTY code with non-thermal electron DFs, namely the κ and power-law DFs, implement Cartesian Kerr–Schild coordinates, accelerate the code with MPI, and couple the code to the non-uniform adaptive mesh refinement grid data from the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics code BHAC. For the Compton scattering process, we derive two sampling kernels for both DFs. Finally, we present a series of code tests to verify the accuracy of our schemes. The implementation of non-thermal DFs opens the possibility of studying the effect of non-thermal emission on previously developed black hole accretion models.
Adaptive Angular Quadrature Scheme for a backwards-in-time Method of Characteristics Solution to the Radiative Transfer Equation [Slides]
Radiative transfer/radiation transport are important problems to solve in astrophysics and high energy density physics. Various methods exist to solve radiation transport, such as Monte Carlo (MC), Discrete Ordinates (S N ), Method of Characteristics (MOC), and the spherical harmonics (P N ) method. Method of Characteristics requires “launching” of rays in discrete directions. Unresolved details of angular mesh create ray effects and can miss sources in the domain. Ray effects can lead to unphysical “stepping” in solution and incorrect energy deposition. Adaptive quadrature schemes can be used to detect and mitigate these effects. The Method of Characteristics (MOC) is a common method for solving hyperbolic PDEs in radiation transport and supersonic flow problems. Generally in MOC for radiation transport, virtual particles are tracked from birth to the end of a timestep. This requires interpolation to go from final location to cell averaged or corner values of angular intensity. Backwards-in-Time (BIT) particle tracking avoids this by prescribing the final position of the virtual particle at the cell nodes/corners. Angular intensities are computed at time k + 1 by launching ray back to previous timestep(s), or t = 0. Scheme allows solution to be computed as the characteristic ray is traced backwards in time.
bolt: A GPU-Accelerated Solver for Marginally Collisional Kinetic Physics Using a High- Resolution Constrained Transport Scheme
Collisionless and marginally collisional plasmas are very expensive to simulate due to high dimensionality and large scale separations, especially in global problems with additional length scales. bolt addresses this challenge by achieving high performance on GPUs using the arrayfire performance portability library. We have demonstrated accuracy on a range of test problems, and the bolt code paper is currently in preparation.
iharm3D: Vectorized General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics
iharm3D is an open-source C code for simulating black hole accretion systems in arbitrary stationary spacetimes using ideal general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD). It is an implementation of the HARM (“High Accuracy Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics”) algorithm outlined in Gammie et al. (2003) with updates as outlined in McKinney & Gammie (2004) and Noble et al. (2006). The code is most directly derived from Ryan et al. (2015) but with radiative transfer portions removed. HARM is a conservative finite-volume scheme for solving the equations of ideal GRMHD, a hyperbolic system of partial differential equations, on a logically Cartesian mesh in arbitrary coordinates.
Jayenne Physics Manual, Revision 1.0 - An Implicit Monte Carlo Code for Thermal Radiative Transfer
This physics manual is intended to document all of the methods used in version 8 of the Jayenne Implicit Monte Carlo solver library. The goal of this manual is to provide a general overview of the basic methods used, and provide a list of references that detail methods that have been implemented in to the Jayenne library.
Bolt: A Fast Solver for Kinetic Theories Using a High-Resolution Constrained Transport Scheme [Slides]
Our understanding of collisionless and semi-collisional plasmas in the nonlinear regime is limited by the expense of computing solutions numerically. Bolt is a fast, GPU-accelerated code for rapidly computing such solutions with accurate transport and an approximate collision operator. Such calculations are relevant to both problems in astrophysics, such as heat conduction and magnetic reconnection in accretion disks around black holes, and also to programmatic interests at LANL. The bolt code paper, demonstrating accuracy via a suite of test problems calculated on kodiak, is currently in preparation.
w19_ebhlight3d: 3D Radiation Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Accreting Black Holes [Slides]
A brief status of the project is provided.
Integrating Radiation into Relativistic Fluid Codes
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Full transport model of GW170817-like disk produces a blue kilonova
The 2017 detection of the inspiral and merger of two neutron stars in gravitational waves and gamma rays was accompanied by a quickly reddening transient. Such a transient was predicted to occur following a rapid neutron capture (r-process) nucleosynthesis event, which synthesizes neutron-rich, radioactive nuclei and can take place in both dynamical ejecta and in the wind driven off the accretion torus formed after a neutron star merger. In this study, we present the first three-dimensional general relativistic, full transport neutrino radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations of the black hole-accretion disk-wind system produced by the GW170817 merger. We show that the small but non-negligible optical depths lead to neutrino transport globally coupling the disk electron fraction, which we capture by solving the transport equation with a Monte Carlo method. The resulting absorption drives up the electron fraction in a structured, continuous outflow, with electron fraction as high as Y e ~ 0.4 in the extreme polar region. Finally, we show via nuclear reaction network and radiative transfer calculations that nucleosynthesis in the disk wind will produce a blue kilonova.
Neutron Star Mergers and Neutrino Driven Accretion Flows [PowerPoint]
No abstract provided.