5.4. Hydro driver

Some users run complex and computationally expensive hydrodynamical simulations, and want to be able to calculate the corresponding X-ray spectrum. Without having to implement these hydro-codes into it is now possible to do this.

For that purpose we offer the Fortran90 subroutine hydro_driver.f90. Basically, it does the following:

  1. It reads the needed parameters as subroutine arguments.

  2. It does a few sanity checks (ion concentrations should be non-negative, and the total H+H column density must be 1.

  3. It then creates a file called “spexicon.dat” containing the ion concentrations.

  4. It also creates a file called “spexgrid.egr” containing the energy grid.

  5. It then creates a file called “spexdriver.com” that contains the commands to run in batch mode.

  6. This file is executed, and creates a file “spexoutput.asc” containing the emitted spectrum.

  7. SPEX terminates.

  8. The subroutine reads the file “spexoutput.asc” and puts the spectrum in the appropriate output array of the subroutine.

The input arguments of the subroutine are as follows:

hden : The Hydrogen density in units of 10^{20} \mathrm{m}^{-3}. Real number.
t : The electron temperature in keV. Real number.
it : The ion temperature in keV, used for line broadening. Real number.
vmic : The microturbulence velocity, in \mathrm{km}\ \mathrm{s}^{-1}, used for line broadening. Real number.
volume : The emitting volume, in units of 10^{24} \mathrm{m}^3. Real number.
con(31,30) : Array with ion concentrations relative to hydrogen (number densities). The abundances of the metals should be taken into account in this; thus, for example, for cosmic abundances, oxygen has a number density of about 0.001 per hydrogen atom, hence the sum of all oxygen ion concentrations should then be 0.001. The array con(jz,iz) contains for each element (labeled with atomic number iz, H=1, He=2 etc.) the concentration; jz indicates the ionisation stage (1=I=neutral, 2=II=singly ionized, etc.; do not forget to include the bare nucleus as the last one. Array elements with jz>iz+1 will be ignored. Note that as things are normalised to hydrogen, con(1,1) + con(2,1) = 1 is obligatory! Real array.
neg : Number of energy bins. Integer number.
eg(0:neg) : Energy bin boundaries in keV; the boundaries of the first bin are stored in eg(0) and eg(1); the second bin in eg(1) and eg(2); etc. Real array.

The output arguments of the subroutine are as follows:

spec(neg) : The emitted spectrum in units of 10^{44} photons/s/keV. Divide this number by 4\pi d^2 with d the source distance to get the flux at Earth. Real array.