General relativistic force-free electrodynamics with a discontinuous Galerkin-finite difference hybrid method
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1.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Relativistic plasmas around compact objects can sometimes be approximated as being force-free. In this limit, the plasma inertia is negligible and the overall dynamics is governed by global electric currents. We present a novel numerical approach for simulating such force-free plasmas, which allows for high accuracy in smooth regions as well as capturing dissipation in current sheets. Using a high-order accurate discontinuous Galerkin method augmented with a conservative finite-difference method, we demonstrate efficient global simulations of black hole and neutron star magnetospheres. In addition to a series of challenging test problems, we show that our approach can—depending on the physical properties of the system and the numerical implementation—be up to 10× more efficient than conventional simulations, with a speedup of 2–3× for most problems we consider in practice.
Copyright and License
© 2024 American Physical Society.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to Kyle Nelli and Nils Vu for helpful discussions and technical support during various stages of this project. Y. K. acknowledges Cristòbal Armaza for encouraging conversations. Computations were performed on the Wheeler cluster and Resnick HPC Center at Caltech. E. R. M. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. AST-2307394 and No. PHY-2309210, the NSF Frontera supercomputer under grant AST21006, and Delta at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) through allocation No. PHY210074 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation Grants No. 2138259, No. 2138286, No. 2138307, No. 2137603, and No. 2138296. E. R. M. further acknowledges support on Perlmutter through NERSC under Grant No. m4575. The authors acknowledge partial support by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and by NSF Grants No. PHY-2207342 and No. OAC-2209655 at Cornell. Figures in this article were produced using matplotlib [115] and numpy [116] packages.
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 2470-0029
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2307394
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309210
- National Science Foundation
- AST21006
- National Science Foundation
- PHY210074
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2138259
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2138286
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2138307
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2137603
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2138296
- National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
- m4575
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2207342
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2209655
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, TAPIR, Astronomy Department, Resnick Sustainability Institute