Modeling UV Radiation Feedback from Massive Stars: I. Implementation of Adaptive Ray-tracing Method and Tests

Abstract

We present an implementation of an adaptive ray tracing (ART) module in the Athena hydrodynamics code that accurately and efficiently handles the radiative transfer involving multiple point sources on a three-dimensional Cartesian grid. We adopt a recently proposed parallel algorithm that uses non-blocking, asynchronous MPI communications to accelerate transport of rays across the computational domain. We validate our implementation through several standard test problems including the propagation of radiation in vacuum and the expansions of various types of HII regions. Additionally, scaling tests show that the cost of a full ray trace per source remains comparable to that of the hydrodynamics update on up to $\sim 10^3$ processors. To demonstrate application of our ART implementation, we perform a simulation of star cluster formation in a marginally bound, turbulent cloud, finding that its star formation efficiency is $12\%$ when both radiation pressure forces and photoionization by UV radiation are treated. We directly compare the radiation forces computed from the ART scheme with that from the M1 closure relation. Although the ART and M1 schemes yield similar results on large scales, the latter is unable to resolve the radiation field accurately near individual point sources.