Skip to content

Documentation

Welcome to the Thor documentation. Thor is a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer code for simulating resonant line emission through complex astrophysical environments.

  • High Performance

    Built with C++20 and SYCL for seamless execution on CPUs and GPUs. Run large-scale simulations on HPC clusters with MPI.

    Installation

  • Flexible Geometries

    Support for spherical shells, Voronoi meshes, and direct integration with cosmological simulation formats (TNG, FIRE, Simba).

    Datasets

  • Ray Tracing

    Physical ray tracing for projections, volume rendering, and absorption feature analysis alongside MCRT.

    Ray Tracer

  • Simple Configuration

    Define simulations with intuitive YAML configuration files. Extensive examples included.

    Configuration

Citing Thor

If you use Thor in your research, please cite the following paper:

Byrohl, C. & Nelson, D. (2025). THOR: a GPU-accelerated and MPI-parallel radiative transfer code. arXiv:2507.11603. ADS | arXiv

BibTeX 
@ARTICLE{2025arXiv250711603B,
       author = {{Byrohl}, Chris and {Nelson}, Dylan},
        title = "{THOR: a GPU-accelerated and MPI-parallel radiative transfer code}",
      journal = {arXiv e-prints},
     keywords = {Astrophysics of Galaxies, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
         year = 2025,
        month = jul,
          eid = {arXiv:2507.11603},
        pages = {arXiv:2507.11603},
          doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2507.11603},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2507.11603},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.GA},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250711603B},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}