Simulating binary black hole mergers using discontinuous Galerkin methods
Abstract
Binary black holes are the most abundant source of gravitational-wave observations. Gravitational-wave observatories in the next decade will require tremendous increases in the accuracy of numerical waveforms modeling binary black holes, compared to today's state of the art. One approach to achieving the required accuracy is using spectral-type methods that scale to many processors. Using the SpECTRE numerical-relativity code, we present the first simulations of a binary black hole inspiral, merger, and ringdown using discontinuous Galerkin methods. The efficiency of discontinuous Galerkin methods allows us to evolve the binary through ~18 orbits at reasonable computational cost. We then use SpECTRE's Cauchy Characteristic Evolution (CCE) code to extract the gravitational waves at future null infinity. The open-source nature of SpECTRE means this is the first time a spectral-type method for simulating binary black hole evolutions is available to the entire numerical-relativity community.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2410.00265,
title = {Simulating binary black hole mergers using discontinuous Galerkin methods},
author = {Geoffrey Lovelace and Kyle C. Nelli and Nils Deppe and Nils L. Vu and William Throwe and Marceline S. Bonilla and Alexander Carpenter and Lawrence E. Kidder and Alexandra Macedo and Mark A. Scheel and Azer Afram and Michael Boyle and Andrea Ceja and Matthew Giesler and Sarah Habib and Ken Z. Jones and Prayush Kumar and Guillermo Lara and Denyz Melchor and Iago B. Mendes and Keefe Mitman and Marlo Morales and Jordan Moxon and Eamonn O'Shea and Kyle Pannone and Harald P. Pfeiffer and Teresita Ramirez-Aguilar and Jennifer Sanchez and Daniel Tellez and Saul A. Teukolsky and Nikolas A. Wittek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.00265},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
32 pages, 12 figures, 28 ancillary input files