A higher-order Godunov method for radiation hydrodynamics: Radiation subsystem

Abstract

A higher-order Godunov method for the radiation subsystem of radiation hydrodynamics is presented. A key ingredient of the method is the direct coupling of stiff source term effects to the hyperbolic structure of the system of conservation laws; it is composed of a predictor step that is based on Duhamel’s principle and a corrector step that is based on Picard iteration. The method is second-order accurate in both time and space, unsplit, asymptotically preserving, and uniformly well behaved from the photon free streaming (hyperbolic) limit through the weak equilibrium diffusion (parabolic) limit and to the strong equilibrium diffusion (hyperbolic) limit. Numerical tests demonstrate second-order convergence across various parameter regimes.