Benchmarking the Calculation of Stochastic Heating and Emissivity of Dust Grains in the Context of Radiative Transfer Simulations

Contact: Peter Camps – Astronomical Observatory, Ghent University

Summary

Thermal emission by stochastically heated dust grains (SHG) plays an important role in multi-wavelength radiation transport through a dusty medium. It is therefore essential to verify that radiative transfer codes properly calculate the dust emission before studying the effects of spatial distribution and other model parameters on the simulated observables. In this benchmark we compare the dust emissivity calculated by six distinct radiative transfer codes with a reference solution, and discuss the differences between the methods used in the various codes and how they influence the results.

The dust model used in the SHG benchmarks is identical to the dust model in the TRUST benchmarks (Transport of Radiation through a DUSTy medium), which test the actual radiative transfer aspect of various codes.

The SHG benchmark paper was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics (Camps et al. 2015, A&A 580, A87) and can be downloaded here.

Participants

The following table lists the codes and authors participating in this benchmark. For more information on each of the codes, click the links below. For more information on the SHG benchmark, please contact Peter Camps.

SKIRT	Peter Camps, Maarten Baes
DIRTY	Karl Misselt, Karl Gordon
TRADING	Simone Bianchi
CRT	Mika Juvela, Tuomas Lunttila
MCFOST	Christophe Pinte, Michael Fitzgerald
DART-Ray	Giovanni Natale, Joerg Fischera, Cristina Popescu, Richard Tuffs
TRUST	Juergen Steinacker

The reference solutions were calculated with the public version of DustEM.

Index

This web site is organized as follows (also see the navigation bar at the top of the page):

Downloads : offers downloads of the dust model data and of all benchmark reference solutions and results;
Benchmark Info : describes the dust model data, defines the benchmark input fields, and describes the format of the benchmark result files;
Full Solution , Single Grain Solution , Equilibrium Solution , and Effective Grain Solution : show dust emission spectra calculated using various assumptions as summarized in the table below.

Section	Calculation regime	Grain size distribution	Grain properties
Full Solution	stochastic heating	as defined in dust model	as defined in dust model
Single Grain Solution	stochastic heating	all grains have same size	as defined in dust model
Equilibrium Solution	equilibrium only	as defined in dust model	as defined in dust model
Effective Grain Solution	equilibrium only	single "effective" grain	single "effective" grain