Paper detail

bhlight: General Relativistic Radiation Magnetohydrodynamics with Monte Carlo Transport

We present bhlight, a numerical scheme for solving the equations of general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics (GRRMHD) using a direct Monte Carlo solution of the frequency-dependent radiative transport equation. bhlight is designed to evolve black hole accretion flows at intermediate accretion rate, in the regime between the classical radiatively efficient disk and the radiatively inefficient accretion flow (RIAF), in which global radiative effects play a sub-dominant but non-negligible role in disk dynamics. We describe the governing equations, numerical method, idiosyncrasies of our implementation, and a suite of test and convergence results. We also describe example applications to radiative Bondi accretion and to a slowly accreting Kerr black hole in axisymmetry.