Relieving Scale Disparity in Binary Black Hole Simulations

Creators: Wittek, Nikolas A.¹; Barack, Leor²; Pfeiffer, Harald P.¹; Pound, Adam²; Deppe, Nils³; Kidder, Lawrence E.³; Macedo, Alexandra⁴; Nelli, Kyle C.⁵; Throwe, William³; Vu, Nils L.⁵

1. Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
2. University of Southampton
3. Cornell University
4. California State University, Fullerton
5. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Worldtube excision is a method of reducing computational burden in numerical relativity simulations of binary black holes in situations where there is a good analytical model of the geometry around (one or both of) the objects. Two such scenarios of relevance in gravitational-wave astronomy are (1) the case of mass-disparate systems, and (2) the early inspiral when the separation is still large. Here we illustrate the utility and flexibility of this technique with simulations of the fully self-consistent radiative evolution in the model problem of a scalar charge orbiting a Schwarzschild black hole under the effect of scalar-field radiation reaction. We explore a range of orbital configurations, including inspirals with large eccentricity (which we follow through to the final plunge and ringdown) and hyperbolic scattering.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Acknowledgement

A. P. acknowledges the support of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and the ERC Consolidator/UKRI Frontier Research Grant GWModels (selected by the ERC and funded by UKRI [Grant No. EP/Y008251/1]). This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. PHY-2407742, No. PHY-2207342, and No. OAC-2209655 at Cornell. This work was supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation at Cornell. This work was supported in part by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by NSF Grants No. PHY-2309211, No. PHY-2309231, and No. OAC-2209656 at Caltech. This work was supported in part by NSF Awards No. PHY-2208014 and No. AST-2219109, the Dan Black Family Trust, and Nicholas and Lee Begovich at Cal State Fullerton. Computations were performed on the Urania HPC system at the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility. SpECTRE uses charm++/Converse [70,71], which was developed by the Parallel Programming Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. SpECTRE uses Blaze [72,73], HDF5 [74], the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) [75], yaml-cpp [76], pybind11 [77], libsharp [78], and LIBXSMM [79]. The figures were produced with matplotlib[80,81], numpy [82], and ParaView [83,84].

Supplemental Material

In the supplemental file, we provide additional details on the convergence analysis and finite radius extraction error assessment associated with the simulations presented in the main letter. These studies verify that the observed waveform behavior is numerically robust, and that the dominant errors originate from the controlled approximations inherent in the worldtube excision method.

supplemental.pdf

Additional Information

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.

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