Conservative special relativistic radiative transfer for multidimensional astrophysical simulations: motivation and elaboration

Abstract

Many astrophysical phenomena exhibit relativistic radiative flows. While velocities in excess of $v \sim 0.1c$ can occur in these systems, it has been common practice to approximate radiative transfer to $\cO(v/c)$. In the case of neutrino transport in core-collapse supernovae, this approximation gives rise to an inconsistency between the lepton number transfer and lab frame energy transfer, which have different $\cO(v/c)$ limits. A solution used in spherically symmetric $\cO(v/c)$ simulations has been to retain, for energy accounting purposes, the $\cO(v^2/c^2)$ terms in the lab frame energy transfer equation that arise from the $\cO(v/c)$ neutrino number transport equation. Avoiding the proliferation of such ``extra'' $\cO(v^2/c^2)$ terms in the absence of spherical symmetry motivates a special relativistic formalism, which we exhibit in coordinates sufficiently general to encompass Cartesian, spherical, and cylindrical coordinate systems.