Monte-Carlo closure for moment-based transport schemes in general relativistic radiation hydrodynamics simulations

Understand

General relativistic radiation hydrodynamics simulations are necessary to accurately model a number of astrophysical systems involving black holes and neutron stars.

• Photon transport plays a crucial role in radiatively dominated accretion disks, while neutrino transport is critical to core-collapse supernovae and to the modeling of electromagnetic transients and nucleosynthesis in neutron star mergers.
• However, evolving the full Boltzmann equations of radiative transport is extremely expensive.
• Here, we describe the implementation in the general relativistic SpEC code of a cheaper radiation hydrodynamics method which theoretically converges to a solution of Boltzmann's equation in the limit of infinite numerical resources.