Introduction

Thermal emission by stochastically heated dust grains plays an important role in the radiative transfer problem for a dusty medium. It is therefore essential to verify that radiative transfer codes properly calculate the dust emission before studying the effects of spatial distribution and other model parameters on the simulated observables.

This benchmark includes the optical and calorimetric material properties and the grain size distributions for a typical astronomical dust mixture, and provides dust emission reference solutions for a range of well-defined input radiation fields.

References and downloads

Publication	Camps et al. 2015 [ADS]
Web site	http://www.shg.ugent.be
Ski file	camps.ski

SKIRT results

The figures below show the difference between the SKIRT result and the corresponding reference solution for the input fields specified in the benchmark and for each of three dust populations (silicates, graphite, and PAHs) defined in the benchmark. The input fields vary from extremely weak to very strong (the Mathis series) and from soft to hard (the black-body series). These figures correspond to Figures 5, 6 and 7 of Camps et al. 2015.

Performing this benchmark

To perform this benchmark, download the ski file provided above (References and downloads) and pass it to SKIRT as a single command line argument. After about 15 seconds, SKIRT produces an output file for each of the input fields in the benchmark. The emissivity is listed in a seperate column for each material type in the benchmark dust mixture (in the order Silicates, Graphite, and PAHs, corresponding to the order in which these components are specified in the ski file). You need to add those three columns to obtain the total emissivity of the dust mixture.