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Implement dielectronic recombination suppression calculation#411

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wtbarnes merged 16 commits intomainfrom
nikolic-suppression
Aug 27, 2025
Merged

Implement dielectronic recombination suppression calculation#411
wtbarnes merged 16 commits intomainfrom
nikolic-suppression

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@wtbarnes wtbarnes commented Aug 18, 2025

Fixes #233

TODOs

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Here's the current comparison with the IDL code:

image

There are some minor differences, but given the differences in implementation, this isn't too surprising. In particular, it doesn't seem like the IDL implementation transitions smoothly to 1 for the H- and He-like ions.

What is somewhat surprising is the differences between what is implemented here and the published result (Fig. 2 of Nikolic et al 2018):

image

In particular, the O 4+ (Be-like sequence) appears very different to what is published. I'm not sure why this is or if there is a special case for $N=4$ that I'm not accounting for.

@wtbarnes wtbarnes force-pushed the nikolic-suppression branch from 69352d1 to 15b242e Compare August 26, 2025 14:46
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wtbarnes commented Aug 27, 2025

The updated comparison (solid is fiasco, dashed is IDL) is below:

image

The H and He-like are now much closer to what is in the Nikolic paper. The Be-like suppression (for fiasco and IDL) is still quite different.

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I've now just made this a private method and I'm going to add the docstring info for this feature to the dielectronic recombination rate in a future PR as the user interface for this functionality is going to be via the actual rate calculation.

@wtbarnes wtbarnes marked this pull request as ready for review August 27, 2025 18:22
@wtbarnes wtbarnes added this to the 0.7 milestone Aug 27, 2025
@wtbarnes wtbarnes merged commit 07ebe26 into main Aug 27, 2025
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@wtbarnes wtbarnes deleted the nikolic-suppression branch August 27, 2025 18:23
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pryoung commented Sep 8, 2025

I made some measurements from Figure 5 of Nikolic et al. (2018) to compare suppression factors at x=12.5 for the oxygen ions. I get

            IDL     Nik
  o_2     0.523   0.524
  o_3     0.237   0.237
  o_4     0.209   0.212
  o_5     0.551   0.618  **
  o_6     0.414   0.418
  o_7     0.595   0.594
  o_8     0.722   0.718

The agreement is good except for o_5. I think the Nikolic plot is wrong. If you check the math for the activation density (x), then the suppression factors for both o_5 and o_6 are expected to deviate from one at about the same density, and this is true for the IDL code, but not for Nikolic.
I've attached my version of the Nikolic plot with the latest versions of the IDL routines.
plot_oxygen_results

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pryoung commented Sep 8, 2025

For the apparent problem for He-like oxygen, I computed the suppression factors on a finer density grid, and I get the plot below. Both the o_7 and o_8 curves are smoothly varying around x=10, so this seems to be OK.

plot_oxygen_h_he

I compare the suppression factor values at x=10 for IDL and Nikolic below.

       IDL  Nikolic
o_7   0.958  0.937
o_8   0.986  0.973

There are small but significant differences. I think we can live with these, though.

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wtbarnes commented Sep 9, 2025

Thanks @pryoung. I did a comparison with your most recent changes and get very good agreement for all of the relevant isoelectronic sequences now,

image

There is a small offset in the Be-like sequence but its below 1% relative difference so I'm not that concerned,

image

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Density-dependent suppression factors for dielectronic recombination rates

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