A New Code for Relativistic Hydrodynamics

In an attempt to investigate the nonlinear dynamics such as shock, shear, and turbulence associated with ultra-relativistic jets, we develop a new relativistic hydrodynamics (RHD) code based on the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme. It is a 5th-order accurate, finite-difference scheme, which has been widely used for solving hyperbolic systems of conservation equations. The code is parallelized with MPI and OpenMP. Through an extensive set of tests, the accuracy and efficiency of different WENO reconstructions, and different time discretizations are assessed. Different implementations of the equation of state (EOS) for relativistic fluid are incorporated, As the fiducial setup for simulations of ultra-relativistic jets, we adopt the EOS in Ryu et al. (2006) to treat arbitrary adiabatic index of relativistic fluid, the WENO-Z reconstructions to minimize numerical dissipation without loss of stability, and the strong stability preserving Runge-Kutta (SSPRK) method to achieve stable time stepping with large CFL numbers. In addition, the code includes a high-order flux averaging along the transverse directions for multi-dimensional problems, and the modified eigenvalues for the acoustic modes to effectively control the carbuncle instability. We find that the new code performs satisfactorily simulations of ultra-relativistic jets.