English

Monte Carlo Radiation Transport for Astrophysical Transients Powered by Circumstellar Interaction

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2023-08-11 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce \texttt{SuperLite}, an open-source Monte Carlo radiation transport code designed to produce synthetic spectra for astrophysical transient phenomena affected by circumstellar interaction. \texttt{SuperLite} utilizes Monte Carlo methods for semi-implicit, semi-relativistic radiation transport in high-velocity shocked outflows, employing multi-group structured opacity calculations. The code enables rapid post-processing of hydrodynamic profiles to generate high-quality spectra that can be compared with observations of transient events, including superluminous supernovae, pulsational pair-instability supernovae, and other peculiar transients. We present the methods employed in \texttt{SuperLite} and compare the code's performance to that of other radiative transport codes, such as \texttt{SuperNu} and CMFGEN. We show that \texttt{SuperLite} has successfully passed standard Monte Carlo radiation transport tests and can reproduce spectra of typical supernovae of Type Ia, Type IIP and Type IIn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.17184,
  title  = {Monte Carlo Radiation Transport for Astrophysical Transients Powered by Circumstellar Interaction},
  author = {Gururaj A. Wagle and Emmanouil Chatzopoulos and Ryan Wollaeger and Christopher J. Fontes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.17184},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication at the Astrophysics Journal