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We present improvements to construction of binary black hole initial data used in SpEC (the Spectral Einstein Code). We introduce new boundary conditions for the extended conformal thin sandwich elliptic equations that enforce the excision…
There is a significant possibility that astrophysical black holes with nearly-extremal spins exist. Numerical simulations of such systems require suitable initial data. In this paper, we examine three methods of constructing…
We present a new numerical scheme to solve the initial value problem for black hole-neutron star binaries. This method takes advantage of the flexibility and fast convergence of a multidomain spectral representation of the initial data to…
The standard approach to initial data for both analytic and numerical computations of black hole collisions has been to use conformally-flat initial geometry. Among other advantages, this choice allows the simple superposition of holes with…
(Abridged) By asymptotically matching a post-Newtonian (PN) metric to two tidally perturbed Schwarzschild metrics, we generate approximate initial data (in the form of a 4-metric) for a nonspinning black hole binary in a circular orbit. We…
We present a new choice of initial data for binary black hole simulations that significantly improves the efficiency of high-spin simulations. We use spherical Kerr-Schild coordinates, where the horizon of a rotating black hole is…
Initial data for numerical evolutions of binary-black holes have been dominated by "conformally flat" (CF) data (i.e., initial data where the conformal background metric is chosen to be flat) because they are easy to construct. However, CF…
Numerical simulations of binary black holes are accompanied by an initial spurious burst of gravitational radiation (called `junk radiation') caused by a failure of the initial data to describe a snapshot of an inspiral that started at an…
Construction of binary black hole initial data is a prerequisite for numerical evolutions of binary black holes. This paper reports improvements to the binary black hole initial data solver in the Spectral Einstein Code, to allow robust…
We construct initial data corresponding to a single perturbed Kerr black hole in vacuum. These data are defined on specific hyperboloidal ("ACMC-") slices on which the mean extrinsic curvature K asymptotically approaches a constant at…
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…
Sequences of initial-data sets representing binary black holes in quasi-circular orbits have been used to calculate what may be interpreted as the innermost stable circular orbit. These sequences have been computed with two approaches. One…
We compare the results of constructing binary black hole initial data with three different decompositions of the constraint equations of general relativity. For each decomposition we compute the initial data using a superposition of two…
We present a new numerical code developed for the evolution of binary black-hole spacetimes using different initial data and evolution techniques. The code is demonstrated to produce state-of-the-art simulations of orbiting and inspiralling…
Numerical studies of the dynamics of gravitational systems, e.g., black hole-neutron star systems, require physical and constraint-satisfying initial data. In this article, we present the newly developed pseudo-spectral code Elliptica, an…
Generalizing previous work we propose how to superpose spinning black holes in a Kerr-Schild initial slice. This superposition satisfies several physically meaningful limits, including the close and the far ones. Further we consider the…
We construct initial data suitable for the Kerr stability conjecture, that is, solutions to the constraint equations on a spacelike hypersurface with boundary entering the black hole horizon that are arbitrarily decaying perturbations of a…
We present a new approach for setting initial Cauchy data for multiple black hole spacetimes. The method is based upon adopting an initially Kerr-Schild form of the metric. In the case of non-spinning holes, the constraint equations take a…
We follow the inspiral and merger of equal-mass black holes (BHs) by the moving puncture technique and demonstrate that both the exterior solution and the asymptotic gravitational waveforms are unchanged when the initial interior solution…
We present a formalism for constructing quasi-equilibrium binary black hole initial data suitable for numerical evolution. We construct quasi-equilibrium models by imposing an approximate helical Killing symmetry appropriate for…