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Clearly documenting "radiation redshift" when comoving_coordinates == 0 #226

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mabruzzo opened this issue Jul 17, 2024 · 0 comments
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@mabruzzo
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In Grackle, the redshift (specified as a_value) plays 2 distinct roles:

  1. It always used to model the impact of background radiation. Concrete examples include:
    • the CMB temperature-floor.
    • Compton cooling off of the CMB.
    • treatment of the UV background. For primordial_chemistry > 0, the reaction rates are impacted. For primordial_chemistry == 0, both the tabulated heating/cooling rates and tabulated temperature calculations are impacted.
  2. When comoving_coordinates == 1, it’s used to parameterize the conversion factor between a simulation's internal code-units and cgs-units changes over cosmic time.

The narrative documentation is currently not very clear about whether Grackle supports modifying a_value when comoving_coordinates == 0 after Grackle is initialized. This is important since Grackle’s comoving-unit-support is not currently compatible with most comoving coordinate systems.

In fact, I had assumed that Grackle didn't support changing the a_value. But, after looking at the code-base, I now think it does. I think we should:

  1. Make this more clear in the narrative documentation
  2. Maybe add a Pygrackle integration test that explicitly confirms that this behavior works as expected.
@mabruzzo mabruzzo added the documentation Documentation needed label Aug 2, 2024
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