Related papers: Inspiraling black-hole binary spacetimes: Challeng…
Recent gravitational wave (GW) detections showing signatures of eccentricity and spin precession underscore the need to model binary black holes (BBHs) possessing these features simultaneously. Most efforts over the past fifteen years to…
Binary-black-hole dynamics cannot be related to the resulting gravitational-wave signal by a constant retarded time. This is due to the non-trivial dynamical spacetime curvature between the source and the signal. In a numerical-relativity…
Motivated by the possibility of observing gravitational waves from merging black holes whose spins are nearly extremal (i.e., 1 in dimensionless units), we present numerical waveforms from simulations of merging black holes with the highest…
Computations in general relativity have revealed an interesting phase diagram for the black hole - black string phase transition, with three different black objects present for a range of mass values. We can add charges to this system by…
We study the transition from inspiral to plunge in general relativity by computing gravitational waveforms of non-spinning, equal-mass black-hole binaries. We consider three sequences of simulations, starting with a quasi-circular inspiral…
Simulations of binary black hole systems using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC) are done on a computational domain that excises the regions inside the black holes. It is imperative that the excision boundaries are outflow boundaries with…
Using two recent techniques giving non-perturbative re-summed estimates of the damping and of the conservative part of the dynamics of two-body systems, we describe the transition between adiabatic inspiral and plunge in binary non-spinning…
We construct approximate analytical solutions to the constraint equations of general relativity for binary black holes of arbitrary mass ratio in quasicircular orbit. We adopt the puncture method to solve the constraint equations in the…
Spacetime singularities in numerical relativity can be avoided by excising a region of the computational domain from inside the apparent horizon. We report on results of such a scheme that is based on using ({\it i}) a horizon locking…
Numerical relativity simulations provide a means by which to study the evolution and end point of strong over-densities in cosmological spacetimes. Specific applications include studies of primordial black hole formation and the robustness…
We perform the first fully nonlinear numerical simulations of black-hole binaries with mass ratios 100:1. Our technique for evolving such extreme mass ratios is based on the moving puncture approach with a new gauge condition and an optimal…
Gravitational waves from the coalescence of two black holes carry the signature of the strong field dynamics of binary black holes. In this work we have used numerical relativity simulations and post-Newtonian theory to investigate this…
I describe the current status of a collaboration with J.D. Romano, R.H. Price, and W. Krivan to model the geometry of and gravitational radiation emitted by a binary system of compact objects in the regime where non-perturbative…
Standard puncture initial data have been widely used for numerical binary black hole evolutions despite their shortcomings, most notably the inherent lack of gravitational radiation at the initial time that is later followed by a burst of…
Binary black hole spacetimes with a helical Killing vector, which are discussed as an approximation for the early stage of a binary system, are studied in a projection formalism. In this setting the four dimensional Einstein equations are…
We present techniques for long-term, stable, and accurate evolutions of multiple-black-hole spacetimes using the `moving puncture' approach with fourth- and eighth-order finite difference stencils. We use these techniques to explore…
A key obstacle for theory-specific tests of general relativity is the lack of accurate black-hole solutions in beyond-Einstein theories, especially for moderate to high spins. We address this by developing a general framework--based on…
The numerical evolution of Einstein's field equations in a generic background has the potential to answer a variety of important questions in physics: from applications to the gauge-gravity duality, to modelling black hole production in TeV…
Recently, the gravitational scattering of two black holes (BHs) treated at the leading order in the weak-field, or post-Minkowskian (PM), approximation to General Relativity has been shown to map bijectively onto a simpler effectively…
We review some of the recent dramatic developments in the fully nonlinear simulation of generic, highly-precessing, black-hole binaries, and introduce a new approach for generating hybrid post-Newtonian / Numerical waveforms for these…