RAM: a Relativistic Adaptive Mesh Refinement Hydrodynamics Code

The authors have developed a new computer code, RAM, to solve the conservative equations of special relativistic hydrodynamics (SRHD) using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) on parallel computers. They have implemented a characteristic-wise, finite difference, weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme using the full characteristic decomposition of the SRHD equations to achieve fifth-order accuracy in space. For time integration they use the method of lines with a third-order total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta scheme. They have also implemented fourth and fifth order Runge-Kutta time integration schemes for comparison. The implementation of AMR and parallelization is based on the FLASH code. RAM is modular and includes the capability to easily swap hydrodynamics solvers, reconstruction methods and physics modules. In addition to WENO they have implemented a finite volume module with the piecewise parabolic method (PPM) for reconstruction and the modified Marquina approximate Riemann solver to work with TVD Runge-Kutta time integration. They examine the difficulty of accurately simulating shear flows in numerical relativistic hydrodynamics codes. They show that under-resolved simulations of simple test problems with transverse velocity components produce incorrect results and demonstrate the ability of RAM to correctly solve these problems. RAM has been tested in one, two and three dimensions and in Cartesian, cylindrical and spherical coordinates. they have demonstrated fifth-order accuracy for WENO in one and two dimensions and performed detailed comparison with other schemes for which they show significantly lower convergence rates. Extensive testing is presented demonstrating the ability of RAM to address challenging open questions in relativistic astrophysics