Simulating binary black hole mergers using discontinuous Galerkin methods

Creators: Lovelace, Geoffrey¹; Nelli, Kyle C.²; Deppe, Nils³; Vu, Nils L.²; Throwe, William³; Bonilla, Marceline S.¹; Carpenter, Alexander¹; Kidder, Lawrence E.³; Macedo, Alexandra¹; Scheel, Mark A.²; Afram, Azer¹; Boyle, Michael³; Ceja, Andrea^{1, 4}; Giesler, Matthew³; Habib, Sarah²; Jones, Ken Z.¹; Kumar, Prayush⁵; Lara, Guillermo⁶; Melchor, Denyz^{1, 7}; Mendes, Iago B.^{2, 8}; Mitman, Keefe³; Morales, Marlo^{1, 9}; Moxon, Jordan²; O'Shea, Eamonn³; Pannone, Kyle¹; Pfeiffer, Harald P.⁶; Ramirez-Aguilar, Teresita^{1, 4}; Sanchez, Jennifer^{1, 4}; Tellez, Daniel¹; Teukolsky, Saul A.²; Wittek, Nikolas A.⁶

1. California State University, Fullerton
2. California Institute of Technology
3. Cornell University
4. Northwestern University
5. International Centre for Theoretical Sciences
6. Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
7. University of California, Los Angeles
8. Oberlin College
9. Washington State University

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 (NR) code, we present the first simulations of a binary black hole inspiral, merger, and ringdown using discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods. The efficiency of DG 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 NR community.

Copyright and License

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

Charm++/Converse [96] was developed by the Parallel Programming Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The figures in this article were produced with matplotlib [97, 98], TikZ [99], ParaView [100, 101], numpy [102], scipy [103], and scri [104–107]. Computations were performed at the Resnick High-Performance Computing Center; a facility supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute; at Caltech, the mbot cluster at Cornell, the ocean cluster at Cal State Fullerton, and the Urania cluster at the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility. We are pleased to thank Josh Smith for helpful discussions. This work was supported in part by NSF awards PHY-2208014 and AST-2219109, the Dan Black Family Trust, and Nicholas and Lee Begovich at Cal State Fullerton. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants Nos. PHY-2407742, PHY-2207342 and OAC-2209655 at Cornell. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work was supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation at Cornell. Support for this work was provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant number HST-HF2-51562.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555.This work was supported in part by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by NSF Grants Nos. PHY-2309211, PHY-2309231 and OAC-2209656 at Caltech. P K acknowledges support of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under Project No. RTI4001, and by the Ashok and Gita Vaish Early Career Faculty Fellowship at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences.

Data Availability

The data cannot be made publicly available upon publication because they are not available in a format that is sufficiently accessible or reusable by other researchers. The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the authors.

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