Athena: A New Code for Astrophysical MHD

By James M. Stone, Thomas A. Gardiner, Peter J. Teuben, J. Hawley, Jacob B. Simon. 2008

899 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A new code for astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) is described. The code has been designed to be easily extensible for use with static and adaptive mesh refinement. It combines higher order Godunov methods with the constrained transport (CT) technique to enforce the divergence-free constraint on the magnetic field. Discretization is based on cell-centered volume averages for mass, momentum, and energy, and face-centered area averages for the magnetic field. Novel features of the algorithm include (1) a consistent framework for computing the time- and edge-averaged electric fields used by CT to evolve the magnetic field from the time- and area-averaged Godunov fluxes, (2) the extension to MHD of spatial reconstruction schemes that involve a dimensionally split time advance, and (3) the extension to MHD of two different dimensionally unsplit integration methods. Implementation of the algorithm in both C and FORTRAN95 is detailed, including strategies for parallelization using domain decomposition. Results from a test suite which includes problems in one-, two-, and three-dimensions for both hydrodynamics and MHD are given, not only to demonstrate the fidelity of the algorithms, but also to enable comparisons to other methods. The source code is freely available for download on the web.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86c962427e33727209d34b17aa827da9b923c663

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Citations in the corpus

The SILCC (SImulating the LifeCycle of molecular Clouds) project – I. Chemical evolution of the supernova-driven ISM (2014, methodology): “…used in the work of Kim, Kim & Ostriker (2011), Shetty & Ostriker (2012), and Kim, Ostriker & Kim (2013), carried out with the ATHENA MHD code (Stone et al. 2008), is different since they correlate SN explosions with dynamically forming, local density maxima, and include shearing box boundary…”
A characteristic scale for cold gas (2016, methodology): “This choice is more diffusive, and hence more robust, than the Athena’s default integrator.”
E pur si muove: Galilean-invariant cosmological hydrodynamical simulations on a moving mesh (2009, methodology): “We also present comparisons with the state-of-the-art Eulerian code ATHENA (Stone et al., 2008), both to validate our hydrodynamic algorithms, and to discuss issues of Galilean (non)invariance.”
ASSESSING QUANTITATIVE RESULTS IN ACCRETION SIMULATIONS: FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL (2011, methodology): “The Simon et al. and Davis et al. models have an isothermal equation of state and make use of the Athena code with the HLLD-flux solver (Stone et al. 2008; Stone & Gardiner 2010), but differ in regard to the initial magnetic field and box size.”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, methodology): “The simulations of Kim & Ostriker (2015b) have been performed with the ATHENA code for a homogenous and a structured two-phase medium (cold and warm phase).”
EFFECT OF AMBIPOLAR DIFFUSION ON THE NONLINEAR EVOLUTION OF MAGNETOROTATIONAL INSTABILITY IN WEAKLY IONIZED DISKS (2011, methodology): “Numerical Method We use Athena, a higher-order Godunov MHD code with constrained transport technique to enforce the divergence-free constraint on the magnetic field (Gardiner & Stone 2005, 2008; Stone et al. 2008) for all calculations presented in this paper.”
SUSTAINED MAGNETOROTATIONAL TURBULENCE IN LOCAL SIMULATIONS OF STRATIFIED DISKS WITH ZERO NET MAGNETIC FLUX (2009, methodology): “We use Athena (Gardiner & Stone 2005, 2008; Stone et al. 2008) for all calculations presented in this work.”
ENZO: AN ADAPTIVE MESH REFINEMENT CODE FOR ASTROPHYSICS (2013, methodology): “Double Mach reflection The double Mach reflection test is a classic two-dimensional test of hydrodynamic algorithms originally described in Woodward & Colella (1984a) (and more recently in Stone et al. 2008).”
Global Simulations of the Inner Regions of Protoplanetary Disks with Comprehensive Disk Microphysics (2017, methodology): “We use the newly developed grid-based higher-order Godunov MHD code Athena++ (J. M. Stone et al. 2017, in preparation), which is the successor of the widely used Athena MHD code (Gardiner & Stone 2005, 2008; Stone et al. 2008), to carry out global simulations of PPDs in this work.”
Phantom: A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics Code for Astrophysics (2017, methodology): “The current loop advection test was introduced by Gardiner & Stone (2005, 2008), and regarded by Stone et al. (2008) as the most discerning of their code tests.”
MOMENTUM INJECTION BY SUPERNOVAE IN THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM (2014, methodology): “We solve the hydrodynamics equations with cooling using the Athena code, which employs an unsplit Godunov algorithm (Stone et al. 2008; Stone & Gardiner 2009).”
OBSERVATIONAL SIGNATURES OF PLANETS IN PROTOPLANETARY DISKS: SPIRAL ARMS OBSERVED IN SCATTERED LIGHT IMAGING CAN BE INDUCED BY PLANETS (2015, background): “Compared with its predecessor Athena (Gardiner & Stone 2005, 2008; Stone et al. 2008), Athena++ is highly optimized for efficiency and uses flexible grid structures, allowing global numerical simulations spanning a large range of scales.”
Modeling UV Radiation Feedback from Massive Stars. II. Dispersal of Star-forming Giant Molecular Clouds by Photoionization and Radiation Pressure (2018, methodology): “Radiation Hydrodynamics Scheme For hydrodynamics, we employ Athena’s van Leer-type time integrator (Stone & Gardiner 2009), the HLLC Riemann solver, and a piecewise linear spatial reconstruction scheme.”
Magnetized gas clouds can survive acceleration by a hot wind (2014, methodology): “2 M E T H O D We integrate the MHD equations using the conservative code Athena (Gardiner & Stone 2008; Stone et al. 2008).”
LOCAL STUDY OF ACCRETION DISKS WITH A STRONG VERTICAL MAGNETIC FIELD: MAGNETOROTATIONAL INSTABILITY AND DISK OUTFLOW (2012, methodology): “The streamlines indicate gas velocity, increasing linearly from white with v = 0 to dark red with v = 5cs. integrator (we use the CTU integrator with third order spatial reconstruction, see Stone et al. 2008 for details).”