Cosmological Radiative Transfer Comparison Project

Radiative transfer simulations are now at the forefront of numerical astrophysics. They are becoming crucial for an increasing number of astrophysical and cosmological problems; at the same time their computational cost has come within reach of currently available computational power. Further progress is retarded by the considerable number of different algorithms developed, which makes the selection of the most suitable technique for a given problem a non-trivial task. The aim of this comparison project is to asses the validity ranges, accuracy and performances of these schemes. Currently 13 independent RT codes are participating in this project. They are being tested on 8 test problems:

(0) basic physics;
(1) isothermal HII region expansion;
(2) HII region expansion with evolving temperature;
(3) I-front trapping and shadowing by a dense clump;
(4) multiple sources in a cosmological density field;
(5) classical HII region gasdynamic expansion;
(6) HII region gasdynamic expansion in 1/r2 density profile, and
(7) photoevaporation of a dense clump.

The present results and tests represent the most complete benchmark available for the development of new codes and improvement of existing ones. To further this aim all test inputs and outputs are made publicly available in digital form at this website.


Test descriptions, data submission, papers and workshops

Description of the tests (PDF version) and of the required data format for submission.

Description of tests (HTML version)

Submit data here.

The first paper, The Static Density Field Tests: ArXiv, ADS

The second paper, The Radiative-Hydrodynamic Tests: ArXiv, ADS

To date we have organized three workshops related to this comparison project:

First workshop

Second workshop

Fourth workshop (Dec., 2012)


Data and Results