A reduced basis method for radiative transfer equation

Linear kinetic transport equations play a critical role in optical tomography, radiative transfer and neutron transport. The fundamental difficulty hampering their efficient and accurate numerical resolution lies in the high dimensionality of the physical and velocity/angular variables and the fact that the problem is multiscale in nature. Leveraging the existence of a hidden low-rank structure hinted by the diffusive limit, in this work, we design and test the angular-space reduced order model for the linear radiative transfer equation, the first such effort based on the celebrated reduced basis method (RBM). Our method is built upon a high-fidelity solver employing the discrete ordinates method in the angular space, an asymptotic preserving upwind discontinuous Galerkin method for the physical space, and an efficient synthetic accelerated source iteration for the resulting linear system. Addressing the challenge of the parameter values (or angular directions) being coupled through an integration operator, the first novel ingredient of our method is an iterative procedure where the macroscopic density is constructed from the RBM snapshots, treated explicitly and allowing a transport sweep, and then updated afterwards. A greedy algorithm can then proceed to adaptively select the representative samples in the angular space and form a surrogate solution space. The second novelty is a least-squares density reconstruction strategy, at each of the relevant physical locations, enabling the robust and accurate integration over an arbitrarily unstructured set of angular samples toward the macroscopic density. Numerical experiments indicate that our method is highly effective for computational cost reduction in a variety of regimes.