Diagnostics of the molecular component of PDRs with mechanical heating.
  II: line intensities and ratios
  CO observations in active galactic nuclei and star-bursts reveal high kinetic
temperatures. Those environments are thought to be very turbulent due to
dynamic phenomena such as outflows and high supernova rates. We investigate the
effect of mechanical heating (MH) on atomic fine-structure and molecular lines,
and their ratios. We use those ratios as a diagnostic to constrain the amount
of MH in an object and also study its significance on estimating the H2 mass.
Equilibrium PDRs models were used to compute the thermal and chemical balance
for the clouds. The equilibria were solved for numerically using the optimized
version of the Leiden PDR-XDR code. Large velocity gradient calculations were
done as post-processing on the output of the PDR models using RADEX. High-J CO
line ratios are very sensitive to MH. Emission becomes at least one order of
magnitude brighter in clouds with n~10^5~cm^-3 and a star formation rate of 1
Solar Mass per year (corresponding to a MH rate of 2 * 10^-19 erg cm^-3 s^-1).
Emission of low-J CO lines is not as sensitive to MH, but they do become
brighter in response to MH. Generally, for all of the lines we considered, MH
increases excitation temperatures and decreases the optical depth at the line
centre. Hence line ratios are also affected, strongly in some cases. Ratios
involving HCN are a good diagnostic for MH, such as HCN(1-0)/CO(1-0) and
HCN(1-0)/HCO^+(1-0). Both ratios increase by a factor 3 or more for a MH
equivalent to > 5 percent of the surface heating, as opposed to pure PDRs. The
first major conclusion is that low-J to high-J intensity ratios will yield a
good estimate of the MH rate (as opposed to only low-J ratios). The second one
is that the MH rate should be taken into account when determining A_V or
equivalently N_H, and consequently the cloud mass. Ignoring MH will also lead
to large errors in density and radiation field estimates.
