BLACK HOLE SIMULATION
Participants: Pablo Laguna, Jinchao Xu, Pengtao Sun
  • Numerical evolutions of black holes have been improved slowly but steadily over the last few years and now first attempts are being made to extract physical information from these evolutions. Most notably one wants to predict the gravitational radiation emitted during black hole coalescence
  • Initial data are the starting point for any numerical simulation. In the case of numerical relativity, Einstein's equations constrain our choices of these initial data.
  • The quality of the initial data will be crucial to the success of the predictions of the gravitational wave forms. Unphysical gravitational radiation present in the initial data will contribute to the gravitational waves computed in an evolution and might overwhelm the true gravitational wave signature of the physical process under consideration. Therefore an important question is how to control the gravitational wave content of initial-data sets, and how to specify astrophysically relevant initial data with the appropriate gravitational wave content, for e.g. two black holes orbiting each other.
BLACK HOLE IN 3D
BLACK HOLE IN 2D
  • Extreme mass ratios binary systems, binaries involving compact objects such as stellar mass black holes or neutron stars orbiting super-massive black holes, are considered to be a primary source of gravitational radiation to be detected by the space-based interferometer LISA.
  • The numerical modeling of these binary systems is extremely challenging because the scales involved expand orders of magnitude. One needs to handle large wavelength scales comparable to the super-massive black hole and, at the same time, to resolve the scales in the vicinity of the small compact object where radiation reaction effects play a crucial role
  • Finite element methods are a natural choice to achieve this high level of adaptivity. To demonstrate this, we present results of a toy problem consisting of a point-like source orbiting a black hole in scalar gravitation.

Comments and Questions? Please email pengtao.sun@unlv.edu

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