Applied and Computational Mathematics Seminar

Seminar Details

Speaker:
Nikolas Wittek
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)
Title:
Relieving the scale disparity in binary black hole simulations
Time:
2PM Wednesday, 27 November 2024
Location:
C2.27 Beech Hill (2nd Floor)

Binary black hole simulations become increasingly more computationally expensive with smaller mass ratios, partly because of the longer evolution time, and partly because the lengthscale disparity dictates smaller time steps. These evolutions can be made feasible by excising a region ("worldtube") much larger than the small black hole from the numerical domain, and replacing it with an analytical model approximating a tidally deformed black hole. I will give an overview of this technique and present results from a toy model consisting of a scalar charge orbiting a Schwarzschild black hole. The radiative evolution of the orbit under the back-reaction from the scalar field is carried out for the first time in a self-consistent manner. The model is robust enough to handle highly eccentric orbits as well as hyperbolic trajectories.

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