Time dependent radiative transfer: Application on core collapse SNe and cosmic recombination

Abstract

I have conducted my PhD dissertation research at the department of Physics and As-

tronomy at the University of Oklahoma. My thesis adviser, Dr Eddie Baron, and Peter Hauschildt

(Hamburger Sternwarte, Germany) have developed an advance d general purpose stellar atmosphere

code PHOENIX (Hauschildt et al., 1997) over the past many years. Most of my dissertation research

involves working extensively on PHOENIX primarily for SNe related applications. Motivation for

the first project was to investigate the importance of time-dependence in the type II SNe atmo-

spheres. It is claimed that the hydrogen recombination time increases due to Lα trapping and

ionization from the second level and therefore it is necessary to incorporate time dependence to

reproduce the Balmer profile of SN 1987A early spectra (Utrob in and Chugai (2005), Dessart and

Hillier (2008)). I implemented time dependence in the rate equations for different species and

added the 2s-1s non-resonant transition in PHOENIX in order to explicitly estimate the recombina-

tion time. I generated the time dependent profiles for the ionization fraction, recombination time

and spectra for SN 1987A and SN 1999em. For SN 1987A and SN 1999em I started respectively at

2 and 7 days following the explosion and generated time dependent profiles at intervals of 2-4 days

upto 20 and 40 days (since explosion) respectively. I compared the observed spectra for SN 1987A

with the synthetic spectra generated from both time dependent (TD) and time independent (TI) rate

equations using a 31 level hydrogen atom model. Based on my comparison I concluded that 1)

the Balmer profile in SN 1987 A spectra could be produced without TD by tuning the input lumi-

nosity at all epochs and 2) TD is more important at early epochs than later ones. I also compared

the recombination times from a 4-level hydrogen atom model t o that from the multi-level cases. I

concluded that it is very important to include many angular momentum sub-states to get a realistic

estimate of the recombination time which is overestimated if the additional angular momentum

sub-states are ignored. These results have been described i n detail in De et al. (2009). I have also

studied the effects of non-resonant transitions (De et al. 2009 in preparation) and concluded that

these effects are more important in a multi-level atomic fra mework in a metal-deficient environ-

ment. Recently I have been modifying PHOENIX to apply it to study the cosmic recombination

epoch and implementing Compton scattering. The idea is to generate an accurate time-dependent

variation of the ionization fraction of the universe during the recombination era which strongly

affects the CMB polarization and power spectra. In addition to working on radiative transfer prob-

lems I have worked on the cosmological dark matter density field during my graduate school years

at Carnegie Mellon University under my then adviser Dr Ruper t Croft. I investigated how statistical

measures derived from the dark matter mass density field coul d predict cosmological parameters

independent of uncertainties from galaxy formation theori es (De and Croft, 2007) and applied this

to the 2dF redshift survey to constrain the cosmological par ameters (De and Croft, 2009).