Be. Stern et al., A LARGE-PARTICLE MONTE-CARLO CODE FOR SIMULATING NONLINEAR HIGH-ENERGY PROCESSES NEAR COMPACT OBJECTS, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 272(2), 1995, pp. 291-307
High-energy radiation processes in compact cosmic objects are often ex
pected to have a strongly non-linear behaviour. Such behaviour is show
n, for example, by electron-positron pair cascades and the time evolut
ion of relativistic proton distributions in dense radiation fields. Th
ree independent techniques have been developed to simulate these non-l
inear problems: the kinetic equation approach; the phase-space density
(PSD) Monte Carlo method; and the large-particle (LP) Monte Carlo met
hod. In this paper, we present the latest version of the LP method and
compare it with the other methods. The efficiency of the method in tr
eating geometrically complex problems is illustrated by showing result
s of simulations of 1D, 2D and 3D systems. The method is shown to be p
owerful enough to treat non-spherical geometries, including such effec
ts as bulk motion of the background plasma, reflection of radiation fr
om cold matter, and anisotropic distributions of radiating particles.
It can therefore be applied to simulate high-energy processes in such
astrophysical systems as accretion discs with coronae, relativistic je
ts, pulsar magnetospheres and gamma-ray bursts.