Determination of the symmetry groups of radiation hydrodynamics equations and the compatible equations of state and opacities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to find all the symmetry groups of the radiation hydrodynamics equations with no a priori assumptions on the equations of state (EOS) and opacities. As shown in earlier works, the application of the Lie group technique to such a system of equations leads to invariance conditions in the form of linear differential equations, which, up until now, were only partially solved. In this paper, using the same technique and under the same assumptions, but with a simpler formulation, we show that these equations can be entirely solved analytically. This result enables us to list all the one-parameter groups that may be symmetry groups of the system. To be actually so, they must be associated with suitable EOS and opacities whose general expressions are also given. The interesting point is that some of them can be chosen so as to fit realistic data for EOS and opacities. Using this property, we propose a method to design low-scale experiments to simulate radiative processes, which would involve too much energy to have experimented with at their full scale. In addition, we derive the reduced systems associated with the one-parameter symmetry groups found. We show that some classical self-similar problems can be extended to more general EOS and opacities, and we treat in detail the self-similar expansion of a semi-infinite medium submitted to an internal source of energy.