A new algorithm for modelling photoionising radiation in smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

We present a new fast algorithm which allows the simulation of ionising radiation emitted from point sources to be included in high-resolution three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations of star cluster formation. We employ a Str\"omgren volume technique in which we use the densities of particles near the line-of-sight between the source and a given target particle to locate the ionisation front in the direction of the target. Along with one--dimensional tests, we present fully three--dimensional comparisons of our code with the three--dimensional Monte-Carlo radiative transfer code, MOCASSIN, and show that we achieve good agreement, even in the case of highly complex density fields.