CASTRO: A New Compressible Astrophysical Solver. III. Multigroup Radiation Hydrodynamics

Abstract

We present a formulation for multigroup radiation hydrodynamics that is correct to order O(v/c) using the comoving-frame approach and the flux-limited diffusion approximation. We describe a numerical algorithm for solving the system, implemented in the compressible astrophysics code, CASTRO. CASTRO uses a Eulerian grid with block-structured adaptive mesh refinement based on a nested hierarchy of logically rectangular variable-sized grids with simultaneous refinement in both space and time. In our multigroup radiation solver, the system is split into three parts: one part that couples the radiation and fluid in a hyperbolic subsystem, another part that advects the radiation in frequency space, and a parabolic part that evolves radiation diffusion and source–sink terms. The hyperbolic subsystem and the frequency space advection are solved explicitly with high-order Godunov schemes, whereas the parabolic part is solved implicitly with a first-order backward Euler method. Our multigroup radiation solver works for both neutrino and photon radiation.