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We need to address a few questionable choices pertaining to h2dustS and h2dustC. I enumerate these issues below:
- first of all
h2dustSis a terrible name. - The current description withininitialize_rates(and attached toadd_h2dust_S_reaction_ratesays that it specifies the H2 formation rate on dust grains with S compositions- Up until now, I've always assumed that "S" represents the atomic number for Sulfur. While it may be obvious to people who know more about dust chemistry than me (honestly, that's a very low bar) that this must refer to silicate surfaces, it is stil a terrible name because we make extensive use of atomic symbols throughout the codebase (e.g. some dust grain species are named
MgSiO3_dust,SiM_dust, etc). - the fact that this is intended for silicates is made clear by the citation attached to the
h2dust_S_ratefunction: Cazaux & Tielens 2002. The ADS page is here - we should absolutely adopt a more descriptive name, like
h2dust_silicateor something.
- Up until now, I've always assumed that "S" represents the atomic number for Sulfur. While it may be obvious to people who know more about dust chemistry than me (honestly, that's a very low bar) that this must refer to silicate surfaces, it is stil a terrible name because we make extensive use of atomic symbols throughout the codebase (e.g. some dust grain species are named
- Next, we need to figure out where the values used in
h2dustCare taken from.- The definition of
h2dust_C_ratemention cites Cazaux & Tielens 2002, but I can't find any mention of the values (maybe its buried in there? I didn't read it super carefully) - There's a small chance it could come from this paper https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004ApJ...604..222C/abstract (it was originally submitted in 2002), but from a quick skim I didn't see any obvious references to the coefficients that the function uses
- The definition of
- We should also rename
h2dustCin a consistent manner with how we renameh2dustS. - Maybeh2dust_carbonaceous?- For context, it's only used with the
AC_dustspecies (amorphous carbon). We probably don't want to just call ith2dust_carbonsince it isn't use with organic dust grain species (which of course must definitionally be composed of carbon).
- For context, it's only used with the
- Finally we must address the fact that
h2dustSis used for every grain species except forAC_dust(amorphous carbon). This includes grains that are clearly not silicates.- as a reminder, the dust grain species include
MgSiO3_dust(enstatite),AC_dust(amorphous carbon),SiM_dust(metallic silicon),FeM_dust(metallic iron),Mg2SiO4_dust(forsterite),Fe3O4_dust(magnetite),SiO2_dust(silica),MgO_dust(magnesia),FeS_dust(troilite),Al2O3_dust(alumina),ref_org_dust(refractory organics),vol_org_dust(volatile organics),H2O_ice_dust(water ice) - at the bare minimum, we must very explicitly document this behavior. It's obviously a shortcoming in the dust-chemistry module. Importantly it's something that could change between Grackle versions. We should consider addressing the following questions:
- Is this choice physically motivated or a common convention? (I have a sneaking suspicion that there wasn't an obvious model to use and this is a quick and dirty choice)
- do we have a sense for how "wrong" the choice is? (e.g. will it generally overpredict/underpredict)
- why don't we use the generic
h2dustrate as a generic fallback for non-silicate grains instead of usingh2dustS?
- as a reminder, the dust grain species include
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