Fervent: Chemistry-coupled, ionizing and non-ionizing radiative feedback in hydrodynamical simulations

Abstract

We introduce a radiative transfer code module for the magnetohydrodynamical adaptive mesh refinement code FLASH 4. It is coupled to an efficient chemical network which explicitly tracks the three hydrogen species H, H2, H+ as well as C+ and CO. The module is geared towards modelling all relevant thermal feedback processes of massive stars, and is able to follow the non-equilibrium time-dependent thermal and chemical state of the present-day interstellar medium as well as that of dense molecular clouds. We describe in detail the implementation of all relevant thermal stellar feedback mechanisms, i.e. photoelectric, photoionization and H2 dissociation heating as well as pumping of molecular hydrogen by UV photons. All included radiative feedback processes are extensively tested.We also compare our module to dedicated photodissociation region (PDR) codes and find good agreement in our modelled hydrogen species once our radiative transfer solution reaches equilibrium. In addition, we show that the implemented radiative feedback physics is insensitive to the spatial resolution of the code and show under which conditions it is possible to obtain well-converged evolution in time. Finally, we briefly explore the robustness of our scheme for treating combined ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.