1,763 research outputs found
Ultrafast effective multi-level atom method for primordial hydrogen recombination
Cosmological hydrogen recombination has recently been the subject of renewed
attention because of its importance for predicting the power spectrum of cosmic
microwave background anisotropies. It has become clear that it is necessary to
account for a large number n >~ 100 of energy shells of the hydrogen atom,
separately following the angular momentum substates in order to obtain
sufficiently accurate recombination histories. However, the multi-level atom
codes that follow the populations of all these levels are computationally
expensive, limiting recent analyses to only a few points in parameter space. In
this paper, we present a new method for solving the multi-level atom
recombination problem, which splits the problem into a computationally
expensive atomic physics component that is independent of the cosmology, and an
ultrafast cosmological evolution component. The atomic physics component
follows the network of bound-bound and bound-free transitions among excited
states and computes the resulting effective transition rates for the small set
of "interface" states radiatively connected to the ground state. The
cosmological evolution component only follows the populations of the interface
states. By pre-tabulating the effective rates, we can reduce the recurring cost
of multi-level atom calculations by more than 5 orders of magnitude. The
resulting code is fast enough for inclusion in Markov Chain Monte Carlo
parameter estimation algorithms. It does not yet include the radiative transfer
or high-n two-photon processes considered in some recent papers. Further work
on analytic treatments for these effects will be required in order to produce a
recombination code usable for Planck data analysis.Comment: Version accepted by Phys. Rev. D. Proof of equivalence of effective
and standard MLA methods moved to the main text. Some rewording
A class of Galerkin schemes for time-dependent radiative transfer
The numerical solution of time-dependent radiative transfer problems is
challenging, both, due to the high dimension as well as the anisotropic
structure of the underlying integro-partial differential equation. In this
paper we propose a general framework for designing numerical methods for
time-dependent radiative transfer based on a Galerkin discretization in space
and angle combined with appropriate time stepping schemes. This allows us to
systematically incorporate boundary conditions and to preserve basic properties
like exponential stability and decay to equilibrium also on the discrete level.
We present the basic a-priori error analysis and provide abstract error
estimates that cover a wide class of methods. The starting point for our
considerations is to rewrite the radiative transfer problem as a system of
evolution equations which has a similar structure like first order hyperbolic
systems in acoustics or electrodynamics. This analogy allows us to generalize
the main arguments of the numerical analysis for such applications to the
radiative transfer problem under investigation. We also discuss a particular
discretization scheme based on a truncated spherical harmonic expansion in
angle, a finite element discretization in space, and the implicit Euler method
in time. The performance of the resulting mixed PN-finite element time stepping
scheme is demonstrated by computational results
Deterministic Partial Differential Equation Model for Dose Calculation in Electron Radiotherapy
Treatment with high energy ionizing radiation is one of the main methods in
modern cancer therapy that is in clinical use. During the last decades, two
main approaches to dose calculation were used, Monte Carlo simulations and
semi-empirical models based on Fermi-Eyges theory. A third way to dose
calculation has only recently attracted attention in the medical physics
community. This approach is based on the deterministic kinetic equations of
radiative transfer. Starting from these, we derive a macroscopic partial
differential equation model for electron transport in tissue. This model
involves an angular closure in the phase space. It is exact for the
free-streaming and the isotropic regime. We solve it numerically by a newly
developed HLLC scheme based on [BerCharDub], that exactly preserves key
properties of the analytical solution on the discrete level. Several numerical
results for test cases from the medical physics literature are presented.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
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