Smoothed Emission for IMC

Abstract

Here is a review of the current way we handle source photons in Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC). A source photon is created with a randomly sampled position x{sub p} in the zone, a direction {Omega}{sub p}, a frequency v{sub p} sampled from the appropriate distribution, and a time t{sub p} uniformly sampled from [t{sup n}, t{sup n+1}]. The source photons each have an energy E{sub p}. The sum of E{sub p} over all of the photons equals the energy of the source for that time step. In the case of thermal emission in a zone with Volume V, they would have {Sigma}{sub p=1}{sup N} E{sub p} = {sigma} {sub p}acT{sup 4}V{Delta}t, where N is the number of thermal source photons for that time step, and {sigma}{sub p} is the Planck mean opacity. Census photons do not differ from source photons in any way, except that they all start the time step with t{sub p} = t{sup n}. Then they advance each photon until it reaches the end of the time step. When they are done with all of the photons, they update the matter temperature using the difference between the emitted and absorbed energy, and proceed to the next time step