English

Quasi-Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2024-06-25 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We consider an alternative to the Monte Carlo method for dust continuous radiative transfer simulations: the Quasi-Monte Carlo method. We briefly discuss what it is, its history, and possible implementations. We compare the Monte Carlo method with four pseudo-random number generators and five Quasi-Monte Carlo implementations using different low-discrepancy sequences and the Hammersley set. For the comparison, we study different test matter geometries and problems. We present comparison results for single scatterings of radiation from a point source, multiple scatterings of radiation from a point source, and single scatterings of radiation from a spherical star. In all cases, Quasi-Monte Carlo shows better convergence than Monte Carlo. In several test cases, the gain in computation time to achieve a fixed error value reached 40 times. We obtained ten times speed up in many of the considered tests.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.15632,
  title  = {Quasi-Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer},
  author = {S. G. Shulman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15632},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

57 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables; Submitted to Astronomy and Computing

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:15:34.668Z