HELIOS: A new open-source radiative transfer code

Malik, Matej, Grosheintz, Luc, Lukas Grimm, Simon, Mendonça, João, Kitzmann, Daniel and Heng, Kevin (2015) HELIOS: A new open-source radiative transfer code. American Astronomical Society, ESS meeting #3. 01 Jan 2015.

Abstract

I present the new open-source code HELIOS, developed to accurately describe radiative transfer in a wide variety of irradiated atmospheres. We employ a one-dimensional multi-wavelength two-stream approach with scattering. Written in Cuda C++, HELIOS uses the GPU’s potential of massive parallelization and is able to compute the TP-profile of an atmosphere in radiative equilibrium and the subsequent emission spectrum in a few minutes on a single computer (for 60 layers and 1000 wavelength bins).The required molecular opacities are obtained with the recently published code HELIOS-K [1], which calculates the line shapes from an input line list and resamples the numerous line-by-line data into a manageable k-distribution format. Based on simple equilibrium chemistry theory [2] we combine the k-distribution functions of the molecules H2O, CO2, CO & CH4 to generate a k-table, which we then employ in HELIOS.I present our results of the following: (i) Various numerical tests, e.g. isothermal vs. non-isothermal treatment of layers. (ii) Comparison of iteratively determined TP-profiles with their analytical parametric prescriptions [3] and of the corresponding spectra. (iii) Benchmarks of TP-profiles & spectra for various elemental abundances. (iv) Benchmarks of averaged TP-profiles & spectra for the exoplanets GJ1214b, HD189733b & HD209458b. (v) Comparison with secondary eclipse data for HD189733b, XO-1b & Corot-2b.HELIOS is being developed, together with the dynamical core THOR and the chemistry solver VULCAN, in the group of Kevin Heng at the University of Bern as part of the Exoclimes Simulation Platform (ESP) [4], which is an open-source project aimed to provide community tools to model exoplanetary atmospheres.-----------------------------[1] Grimm & Heng 2015, ArXiv, 1503.03806[2] Heng, Lyons & Tsai, Arxiv, 1506.05501Heng & Lyons, ArXiv, 1507.01944[3] e.g. Heng, Mendonca & Lee, 2014, ApJS, 215, 4H[4] exoclime.net

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Contributors

Author: João Mendonça

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