Binary neutron star mergers using a discontinuous Galerkin-finite difference hybrid method

Creators: Deppe, Nils¹; Foucart, Francois²; Bonilla, Marceline S.³; Boyle, Michael¹; Corso, Nicholas J.¹; Duez, Matthew D.⁴; Giesler, Matthew¹; Hébert, François⁵; Kidder, Lawrence E.¹; Kim, Yoonsoo⁵; Kumar, Prayush⁶; Legred, Isaac⁵; Lovelace, Geoffrey³; Most, Elias R.⁵; Moxon, Jordan⁵; Nelli, Kyle C.⁵; Pfeiffer, Harald P.⁷; Scheel, Mark A.⁵; Teukolsky, Saul A.^{1, 5}; Throwe, William¹; Vu, Nils L.⁵

1. Cornell University
2. University of New Hampshire
3. California State University, Fullerton
4. Washington State University
5. California Institute of Technology
6. International Centre for Theoretical Sciences
7. Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

Abstract

We present a discontinuous Galerkin-finite difference hybrid scheme that allows high-order shock capturing with the discontinuous Galerkin method for general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics in dynamical spacetimes. We present several optimizations and stability improvements to our algorithm that allow the hybrid method to successfully simulate single, rotating, and binary neutron stars. The hybrid method achieves the efficiency of discontinuous Galerkin methods throughout almost the entire spacetime during the inspiral phase, while being able to robustly capture shocks and resolve the stellar surfaces. We also use Cauchy-characteristic evolution to compute the first gravitational waveforms at future null infinity from binary neutron star mergers. The simulations presented here are the first successful binary neutron star inspiral and merger simulations using discontinuous Galerkin methods.

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 [144] 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 [145, 146], TikZ [147] and ParaView [148, 149]. Computations were performed with the Wheeler cluster at Caltech and the mbot cluster at Cornell. 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, and NSF Grants Nos. PHY-2207342, PHY-2407742 and OAC-2209655 at Cornell. FF gratefully acknowledges support from the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract Number DE-AC02-05CH11231, from NASA through Grant 80NSSC22K0719, and from the NSF through Grant AST-2107932. MD gratefully acknowledges support from the NSF through Grant PHY-2110287 and support from NASA through Grant 80NSSC22K0719. GL and MSB acknowledge support from NSF Award PHY-2208014, the Dan Black Family Trust and Nicholas and Lee Begovich. IL acknowledges support from the Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0023101. ERM acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. AST-2307394 and PHY-2309210, the NSF Frontera supercomputer under Grant AST21006, and Delta at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) through allocation PHY210074 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation Grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296. ERM further acknowledges support on Perlmutter through NERSC under Grant m4575. PK 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.

Funding

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, and NSF Grants Nos. PHY-2207342, PHY-2407742 and OAC-2209655 at Cornell. FF gratefully acknowledges support from the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract Number DE-AC02-05CH11231, from NASA through Grant 80NSSC22K0719, and from the NSF through Grant AST-2107932. MD gratefully acknowledges support from the NSF through Grant PHY-2110287 and support from NASA through Grant 80NSSC22K0719. GL and MSB acknowledge support from NSF Award PHY-2208014, the Dan Black Family Trust and Nicholas and Lee Begovich. IL acknowledges support from the Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0023101. ERM acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. AST-2307394 and PHY-2309210, the NSF Frontera supercomputer under Grant AST21006, and Delta at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) through allocation PHY210074 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation Grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296. ERM further acknowledges support on Perlmutter through NERSC under Grant m4575. PK 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 that support the findings of this study are openly available at the following URL/DOI: github.com/sxs-collaboration/spectre.

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