Jack T. Dinsmore. November 20, 2022

Finished Dec 8, 2022

Physics 360 Final Project. Stanford University.

The purpose of this project is to generate images of a simple black hole system consisting of an accretion disk and a Compton-scattering corona. Images are generated for the X-ray and optical bands by numerically integrating the equations of motion of light from the observer to the source under the laws of General Relativity. This technique is called ray-tracing.

For a description of the projects and a summary, see the writeup directory. For my final presentation, see presentation. Generated data is contained in the data directory and images of that data in the imager directory, along with the code required to generate images.

Finally, the code to actually do the ray-tracing is in the raytracer directory. It is flexible enough to use any relativistic metric, though Minkowsky, Schwarzschild, Kerr, and Morris-Thorne are already implemented. Likewise, other sources of light may be added to the code by modifying the source.rs and observer.rs files. The code is written in Rust — a relativity recent programming language which is blazing fast and safer than any other alternative of the same performance (i.e., C and C++). The Rust documentation is phenomenal and you should definitely try the online Rust book if you would like to learn it. Experience with another type-safe language like C, C++, or Java is helpful, since Rust has a steep learning curve.

To run the code, in the raytracer directory run

cargo run --release

To generate images, in the imager directory run

python image.py

Initial Commit. Original code moved to old directory. Added new code, data, and summary.

Gave talk. Need to change density profile of the disk and corona and possibly change the colormap and not do redshifting anymore.