Accelerating NLTE radiative transfer by means of the Forth-and-Back Implicit Lambda Iteration: A two-level atom line formation in 2D Cartesian coordinates

State-of-the-art methods in multidimensional NLTE radiative transfer are based on the use of local approximate lambda operator within either Jacobi or Gauss–Seidel iterative schemes. Here we propose another approach to the solution of 2D NLTE RT problems, Forth-and-Back Implicit Lambda Iteration (FBILI), developed earlier for 1D geometry. In order to present the method and examine its convergence properties we use the well-known instance of the two-level atom line formation with complete frequency redistribution. In the formal solution of the RT equation we employ short characteristics with two-point algorithm. Using an implicit representation of the source function in the computation of the specific intensities, we compute and store the coefficients of the linear relations J=a+bS$J=a+\mathit{bS}$ between the mean intensity J and the corresponding source function S. The use of iteration factors in the ‘local’ coefficients of these implicit relations in two ‘inward’ sweeps of 2D grid, along with the update of the source function in other two ‘outward’ sweeps leads to four times faster solution than the Jacobi’s one. Moreover, the update made in all four consecutive sweeps of the grid leads to an acceleration by a factor of 6–7 compared to the Jacobi iterative scheme.