Functional Guide to DESPOTIC Capabilities¶

This section covers the most common tasks for which DESPOTIC can be used. They are not intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the library’s capabilities, and users who wish to understand every available option should refer to Full Documentation of All DESPOTIC Classes and Functions. The routines used in this section are all described in full detail there. For all of these operations, the user should first have imported the basic DESPOTIC class cloud by doing:

from despotic import cloud


In the examples below we will also assume that matplotlib and numpy have both been imported, via:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np


Unit Conventions¶

In this section, and in general when using DESPOTIC, there are two important conventions to keep in mind.

1. All quantities are in CGS units unless otherwise specified. The main exceptions are quantities that are normalized to Solar or Solar neighborhood values (e.g. metallicity and interstellar radiation field strength) and quantities where the conventional unit is non-CGS (e.g. integrated brightness temperatures are expressed in the usual units of K km/s).
2. All rates are expressed per H nucleus, rather than per unit mass or per unit volume. This includes chemical abundances. Thus for example a heating rate of $$\Gamma=10^{-26}$$ should be understood as $$10^{-26}$$ erg/s/H nucleus. An abundance $$x_{\mathrm{He}}=0.1$$ should be understood as 1 He atom per 10 H nuclei.

Line Emission¶

The most basic task in DESPOTIC is computing the line emission emerging from a cloud of specified physical properties. The first step in any computation of line emission is to create a cloud object with the desired properties. This is often most easily done by creating a DESPOTIC cloud file (see Cloud Files), but the user can also create a cloud with the desired properties manually. The properties that are important for line emission are the gas volume density, column density, temperature, velocity dispersion, and chemical composition; these are stored in the cloud class and the composition class within it. For example, the following code snippet:

mycloud = cloud()
mycloud.nH = 1.0e2
mycloud.colDen = 1.0e22
mycloud.sigmaNT = 2.0e5
mycloud.Tg = 10.0
mycloud.comp.xoH2 = 0.1
mycloud.comp.xpH2 = 0.4
mycloud.comp.xHe = 0.1


creates a cloud with all its parameters set to default values, a volume density of H nuclei $$n_{\mathrm{H}} = 10^2\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3}$$, a column density of H nuclei $$N_{\mathrm{H}} = 10^{22}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-2}$$, a non-thermal velocity dispersion of $$\sigma_{\mathrm{NT}} = 2.0 \times 10^5\,\mathrm{cm}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$$, a gas temperature of $$T_g = 10\,\mathrm{K}$$, and a composition that is 0.1 ortho-$$\mathrm{H}_2$$ molecules per H nucleus, 0.4 para-$$\mathrm{H}_2$$ molecules, and 0.1 He atoms per H nucleus.

The next step is to specify the emitting species whose line emission is to be computed. As with the physical properties of the cloud, this is often most easily done by creating a cloud file. However, it can also be done manually by using the cloud.addEmitter method, which allows users to add emitting species to clouds. The following code snippet adds CO as an emitting species, at an abundance of $$10^{-4}$$ CO molecules per H nucleus:

mycloud.addEmitter("CO", 1.0e-4)


The first argument is the name of the emitting species, and the second is the abundance. The requisite molecular data file will be read from disk if it is available, or automatically downloaded from the Leiden Atomic and Molecular Database if it is not (see Atomic and Molecular Data).

Once an emitter has been added, only a single call is required to calculate the luminosity of its lines:

lines = mycloud.lineLum("CO")


The argument is just the name of the species whose line emission should be computed. Note that it must match the name of an existing emitter, and that emitter names are case-sensitive. The value returned by this procedure, which is stored in the variable lines, is a list of dict, with each dict describing the properties of a single line. Lines are ordered by frequency, from lowest to highest. Each dict contains the following keys-value pairs

• freq is the line frequency in Hz
• intIntensity is the frequency-integrated intensity of the line after subtracting off the CMB contribution, in $$\mathrm{erg}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-2}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}\,\mathrm{sr}^{-1}$$
• intTB is the velocity-integrated brightness temperature (again subtracting off the CMB) in $$\mathrm{K}\,\mathrm{km}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$$
• lumPerH is the rate of energy emission in the line per H nucleus in the cloud, in $$\mathrm{erg}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$$.

This is a partial list of what the dict contains; see cloud for a complete listing.

Once the data been obtained, the user can do what he or she wishes with them. For example, to plot velocity-integrated brightness temperature versus line frequency, the user might do:

freq = [l["freq"] for l in lines]
TB = [l["intTB"] for l in lines]
plt.plot(freq, TB, "o")


Heating and Cooling Rates¶

To use DESPOTIC’s capability to calculate heating and cooling rates, in addition to the quantities specified for a calculation of line emission one must also add the quantities describing the dust and the radiation field. As before, this is most easily accomplished by creating a DESPOTIC cloud file (see Cloud Files), but the data can also be input manually. The code snippet below does so:

mycloud.dust.alphaGD   = 3.2e-34    # Dust-gas coupling coefficient
mycloud.dust.sigma10   = 2.0e-25    # Cross section for 10K thermal radiation
mycloud.dust.sigmaPE   = 1.0e-21    # Cross section for photoelectric heating
mycloud.dust.sigmaISRF = 3.0e-22    # Cross section to the ISRF
mycloud.dust.beta      = 2.0        # Dust spectral index
mycloud.dust.Zd        = 1.0        # Abundance relative to Milky Way
mycloud.Td             = 10.0       # Dust temperature
mycloud.rad.TCMB       = 2.73       # CMB temperature
mycloud.rad.ionRate    = 2.0e-17    # Primary ionization rate
mycloud.rad.chi        = 1.0        # ISRF normalized to Solar neighborhood


These quantities specify the dust-gas coupling constant, the dust cross section to 10 K thermal radiation, the dust cross section to the 8 - 13.6 eV photons the dominate photoelectric heating, the dust cross section to the broader interstellar radiation field responsible for heating the dust, the dust spectral index, the dust abundance relative to the Milky Way value, the dust temperature, the cosmic microwave background temperature, the infrared radiation field that heats the dust, the primary ionization rate due to cosmic rays and x-rays, and the ISRF strength normalized to the Solar neighborhood value. All of the numerical values shown in the code snippet above are in fact the defaults, and so none of the above commands are strictly necessary. However, it is generally wise to set quantities explicitly rather than relying on default values.

Once these data have been input, one may compute all the heating and cooling terms that DESPOTIC includes using the cloud.dEdt routine:

rates = mycloud.dEdt()


This call returns a dict which contains the instantaneous rates of heating and cooling. The entries in the dict are: GammaPE, the gas photoelectric heating rate, GammaCR, the gas heating rate due to cosmic ray and X-ray ionization, GammaGrav, the gas heating rate due to gravitational compression, GammaDustISRF, the dust heating rate due to the ISRF, GammaDustCMB, the dust heating rate due to the CMB, GammaDustIR, the dust heating rate due to the IR field, GammaDustLine, the dust heating rate due to absorption of line photons, PsiGD, the gas-dust energy exchange rate (positive means gas heating, dust cooling), LambdaDust, the dust cooling rate via thermal emission, and LambdaLine, the gas cooling rate via line emission. This last quantity is itself a dict, with one entry per emitting species and the dictionary keys corresponding to the emitter names. Thus in the above example, one could see the cooling rate via CO emission by doing:

print rates["LambdaLine"]["CO"]


Temperature Equilibria¶

Computing the equilibrium temperature requires exactly the same quantities as computing the heating and cooling rates; indeed, the process of computing the equilibrium temperature simply amounts to searching for values of $$T_g$$ and $$T_d$$ such that the sum of the heating and cooling rates returned by cloud.dEdt are zero. One may perform this calculation using the cloud.setTempEq method:

mycloud.setTempEq()


This routine iterates to find the equilibrium gas and dust temperatures, and returns True if the iteration converges. After this call, the computed dust and gas temperatures may simply be read off:

print mycloud.Td, mycloud.Tg


The cloud.setTempEq routine determines the dust and gas temperatures simultaneously. However, there are many situations where it is preferable to solve for only one of these two, while leaving the other fixed. This may be accomplished by the calls:

mycloud.setDustTempEq()
mycloud.setGasTempEq()


These routines, respectively, set mycloud.Td while leaving mycloud.Tg fixed, or vice-versa. Solving for one temperature at a time is often faster, and if dust-gas coupling is known to be negligible will produce nearly identical results as solving for the two together.

Time-Dependent Temperature Evolution¶

To perform computations of time-dependent temperature evolution, DESPOTIC provides the method cloud.tempEvol. In its most basic form, this routine simply accepts an argument specifying the amount of time for which the cloud is to be integrated, and returning the temperature as a function of time during this evolution (note that executing this command may take a few minutes, depending on your processor):

mycloud.Tg = 50.0         # Start the cloud out of equilibrium
tFinal = 20 * 3.16e10     # 20 kyr
Tg, t = mycloud.tempEvol(tFinal)


The two values returned are arrays, the second of which gives a series of 100 equally-spaced times between 0 and tFinal, and the first of which gives the temperatures at those times. The number of output times, the spacing between them, and their exact values may all be controlled by optional arguments – see cloud for details. At the end of this evolution, the cloud temperature mycloud.Tg will be changed to its value at the end of 20 kyr of evolution, and the dust temperature mycloud.Tg will be set to its thermal equilibrium value at that cloud temperature.

If one wishes to examine the intermediate states in more detail, one may also request that the full state of the cloud be saved at every time:

clouds, t = mycloud.tempEvol(tFinal, fullOutput=True)


The fullOutput optional argument, if True, causes the routine to return a full copy of the state of the cloud at each output time, instead of just the gas temperature Tg. In this case, clouds is a sequence of 100 cloud objects, and one may interrogate their states (e.g. calculating their line emission) using the usual routines.

Chemical Equilibria¶

DESPOTIC can also compute the chemical state of clouds from a chemical network. Full details on chemical networks are given in Chemistry and Chemical Networks, but for this example we will use a simple network that DESPOTIC ships with, that of Nelson & Langer (1999, ApJ, 524, 923). This network computes the chemistry of carbon and oxygen in a region where the hydrogen is fully molecular. For more details see NL99.

To perform computations with this network, one must first import the class that defines it:

from despotic.chemistry import NL99


One can set the equilibrium abundances of a cloud to the equilibrium values determined by the network via the command:

mycloud.setChemEq(network=NL99)


The argument network specifies that the calculation should use the NL99 class. This call sets the abundances of all the emitters that are included in the network to their equilibrium values. In this case, the network includes CO, and thus it sets the CO abundance to a new value:

print mycloud.emitters["CO"].abundance


One can also see the abundances of all the species included in the network, including those that do not correspond to emitters in the cloud, by printing the chemical network property abundances:

print mycloud.chemnetwork.abundances


Once the chemical network is associated with the cloud, subsequent calls to setChemEq need not include the network keyword. DESPOTIC assumes that all subsequent chemical calculations are to be performed with the same chemical network unless it is explicitly told otherwise via a call to setChemEq or chemEvol (see Time-Dependent Chemical Evolution) that specifies a different chemical network.

Simultaneous Chemical and Thermal Equilibria¶

The setChemEq routine (see Chemical Equilibria) called with no extra arguments leaves the gas temperature fixed. However, it is also possible to compute a simultaneous equilibrium for the temperature and the thermal state. To do so, we first import a chemical network to be used, in this case the Nelson & Langer (1999) network (see Chemical Equilibria):

from despotic.chemistry import NL99


We then call cloud.setChemEq with an optional keyword evolveTemp

mycloud.setChemEq(network=NL99, evolveTemp=iterate)


The network keyword specifies that the computation should use the NL99 network, while evolveTemp specifies how to handle the simultaneous thermal and chemical equilibrium calculation. The options available are

• fixed: gas temperature is held fixed
• iterate: calculation iterates between computing chemical and gas thermal equilibria, i.e., chemical equilibrium is computed at fixed temperature, equilibrium gas temperature (see Temperature Equilibria) is computed for fixed abundances, and the process is repeated until the temperature and abundances converge; dust temperature is held fixed
• iterateDust: same as iterate, except the dust temperature is iterated as well
• gasEq: gas temperature is always set to its instantaneous equilibrium value as the chemical state is evolved toward equilibrium; dust temperature is held fixed
• fullEq: same as gasEq, except that both gas and dust temperatures are set to their instantaneous equilibrium values
• evol: chemical state and gas temperature are evolved in time together, while dust temperature is always set to its instantaneous equilibrium value; evolution stops once gas temperature and abundances stop changing significantly

Note that, while in general the different evolution methods will converge to the same answer, there is no guarantee that they will do in systems where multiple equilibria exist.

Time-Dependent Chemical Evolution¶

DESPOTIC can also calculate time-dependent chemical evolution. This is accomplished through the method cloud.chemEvol. At with cloud.tempEvol (see Time-Dependent Temperature Evolution), this routine accepts an argument specifying the amount of time for which the cloud is to be integrated, and returning the chemical abundances as a function of time during this evolution:

mycloud.rad.ionRate = 2.0e-16 # Raise the ionization rate a lot
tFinal = 0.5 * 3.16e13 # 0.5 Myr
abd, t = mycloud.chemEvol(tFinal, network=NL99)


Note that the network=NL99 option may be omitted if one has previously assigned that network to the cloud (for example by executing the examples in Chemical Equilibria).

The output quantity abd here is an object of class abundanceDict, which is a specialized dict for handling chemical abundances – see abundanceDict. One can examine the abundances of specific species just by giving their chemical names. For example, to see the time-dependent evolution of the abundances of CO, C, and $$\mathrm{C}^+$$, one could do:

plt.plot(t, abd["CO"])
plt.plot(t, abd["C"])
plt.plot(t, abd["C+"])


As with setChemEq, this routine modifies the abundances of emitters in the cloud to the values they achieve at the end of the evolution, so to see the final CO abundance one could do:

print mycloud.emitters["CO"].abundance


Multi-Zone Clouds¶

While most DESPOTIC functionality is provided through the cloud class, which represents a single cloud, it is sometimes useful to have a cloud that contains zones of different optical depths. This functionality is provided through the zonedcloud class. A zonedcloud is just a collection of cloud objects that are characterized by having different column densities (and optionally volume densities), and on which all the operations listed above can be performed in a batch fashion.

One can create a zonedcloud in much the same way as a cloud, but reading from an input file:

from despotic import zonedcloud
zc = zonedcloud(fileName="cloudfiles/MilkyWayGMC.desp")


A zonedcloud is characterized by column densities for each of its zones, which can be accessed through the colDen property:

print zc.colDen


The column densities of all zones, and the number of zones, can be controlled when the zonedcloud is created using the keywords nZone and colDen; see zonedcloud for the full list of keywords.

Once a zonedcloud exists, all of the functions described above in this section are available for it, and will be applied zone by zone. For example, one can do:

zc.setTempEq()
print zc.Tg


to set and then print the temperature in each zone. Commands the report observable quantities or abundances will return appropriately-weighted sums over the entire cloud. For example:

zc.lineLum('co')[0]


returns a dict describing the $$J=1\rightarrow 0$$ line of CO. The quantities intTB and intIntensity that are part of the dict and contain the velocity-integrated brightness temperature and frequency-integrated intensity, respectively (see Line Emission), are sums over all zones, while ones like Tex (the excitation temperature) that do not make sense to sum are returned as an array giving zone-by-zone values.

Computing Line Profiles¶

Line profile computation operates somewhat differently then the previous examples, because it is provided through a stand-alone procedure rather than through the cloud class. This procedure is called lineProfLTE, and may be imported directly from the DESPOTIC package. The routine also requires emitter data stored in an emitterData object. The first step in a line profile calculation is therefore to import these two objects into the python environment:

from despotic import lineProfLTE
from despotic import emitterData


The second step is to read in the emitter data. The interface to read emitter data is essentially identical to the one used to add an emitter to a cloud. One simply declares an emitterData object, giving the name of the emitter as an argument:

csData = emitterData(’CS’) # Reads emitter data for the CS molecule


Alternately, emitter data may be obtained from a cloud, since clouds store emitter data for all their emitters. Using the examples from the previous sections:

coData = mycloud.emitters["CO"].data


copies the emitter data for CO to the variable coData.

The third step is to specify the radius of the cloud, and the profiles of any quantities within the cloud that are to change with radius, including density, temperature, radial velocity, and non-thermal velocity dispersion. Each of these can be constant, but the most interesting applications are when one or more of them are not, in which case they must be defined by functions. These function each take a single argument, the radius in units where the outer radius of the cloud is unity, and return a single floating point value, giving the quantity in question in CGS units. For example, to compute line profiles through a cloud of spatially-varying temperature and infall velocity, one might define the functions:

R = 0.02 * 3.09e18 # 0.2 pc
def TProf(r):
return 8.0 + 12.0*np.exp(-r**2/(2.0*0.5**2))
def vProf(r):
return -4.0e4*r


The first function sets a temperature that varies from 20 K in the center of close to 8 K at the outer edge, and the second defines a velocity that varies from 0 in the center to $$-0.4$$ km $$\mathrm{s}^{-1}$$ (where negative indicates infall) at the outer edge. Similar functions can be defined by density and non-thermal velocity dispersion if the user so desires. Alternately, the user can simply define them as constants:

ncs = 0.1       # CS density 0.1 cm^-3
sigmaNT = 2.0e4 # Non-thermal velocity dispersion 0.2 km s^-1


The final step is to use the lineProfLTE routine to compute the brightness temperature versus velocity:

TB, v = lineProfLTE(cs, 2, 1, R, ncs, TProf, vProf, sigmaNT).


Here the first argument is the emitter data, the second and third are the upper and lower quantum states between which the line is to be computed (ordered by energy, with ground state = 0), followed by the cloud radius, the volume density, the temperature, the velocity, and the non-thermal velocity dispersion. Each of these quantities can be either a float or a callable function of one variable, as in the example above. If it is a float, that quantity is taken to be constant, independent of radius. This routine returns two arrays, the first of which is the brightness temperature and the second of which is the velocity at which that brightness temperature is computed, relative to line center. These can be examined in any of the usual numpy ways, for example by plotting them:

plt.plot(v, TB)


By default the velocity is sampled at 100 values. The routine attempts to guess a reasonable range of velocities based on the input values of radial velocity and velocity dispersion, but these defaults may be overridden by the optional argument vLim, which is a sequence of two values giving the lower and upper limits on the velocity:

TB, v = lineProfLTE(cs, 2, 1, R, ncs, TProf, vProf, sigmaNT,
vLim=[-2e5,2e5]).


A variety of other optional arguments can be used to control the velocities at which the brightness temperature is computed. It is also possible to compute line profiles at positions offset from the geometric center of the cloud, using the optional argument offset – see lineProfLTE.

Escape Probability Geometries¶

DESPOTIC supports three possible geometries that can be used when computing escape probabilities, and which are controlled by the escapeProbGeom optional argument. This argument is accepted by all DESPOTIC functions that use the escape probability formalism, including all those involving computation of line emission. This optional argument, if included, must be set equal to one of the three strings sphere (the default), slab, or LVG. These choices correspond to spherical geometry, slab geometry, and the large velocity gradient approximation, respectively.