Abstract
Astrophysical plasmas are subject to a tight connection between magnetic fields and the diffusion of particles, which leads to an anisotropic transport of energy. Under the fluid assumption, this effect can be reduced to an advection-diffusion equation, thereby augmenting the equations of magnetohydrodynamics. We introduce a new method for solving the anisotropic diffusion equation using an implicit finite-volume method with adaptive mesh refinement and adaptive time-stepping in the ramses code. We apply this numerical solver to the diffusion of cosmic ray energy and diffusion of heat carried by electrons, which couple to the ion temperature. We test this new implementation against several numerical experiments and apply it to a simple supernova explosion with a uniform magnetic field.
Author
Dubois, Yohan; Commerçon, Benoît
Journal
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Paper Publication Date
January 2016
Paper Type
Astroinformatics