Black-hole head-on collisions in higher dimensions

The collision of black holes and the emission of gravitational radiation in higher-dimensional spacetimes are of interest in various research areas, including the gauge-gravity duality, the TeV gravity scenarios evoked for the explanation of the hierarchy problem, and the large-dimensionality limit of general relativity. We present numerical simulations of head-on collisions of nonspinning, unequal-mass black holes starting from rest in general relativity with $4 \leq D\leq 10$ spacetime dimensions. We compare the energy and linear momentum radiated in gravitational waves with perturbative predictions in the extreme mass ratio limit, demonstrating the strength and limitations of black-hole perturbation theory in this context

Unequal-mass boson-star binaries: Initial data and merger dynamics

We present a generalization of the curative initial data construction derived for equal-mass compact binaries in Helfer {\it et al} (2019 Phys. Rev. D 99 044046; 2022 Class. Quantum Grav. 39 074001) to arbitrary mass ratios. We demonstrate how these improved initial data avoid substantial spurious artifacts in the collision dynamics of unequal-mass boson-star binaries in the same way as has previously been achieved with the simpler method restricted to the equal-mass case. We employ the improved initial data to explore in detail the impact of phase offsets in the coalescence of equal- and unequal-mass boson star binaries.Comment: 37 pages, 12 figures, to match published version in CQ

Remnants of compact binary mergers and next-generation numerical relativity codes

Numerical relativity (NR) simulations are crucial for studying the coalescence of compact binaries. Based on NR data, we produce a model for the mass and spin of the remnant black hole (BH) for the coalescence of black hole-neutron star systems, discussing its crucial role in gravitational wave (GW) modeling and in the parameter estimation of the two signals GW200105 and GW200115. In the context of binary neutron star merger simulations, we perform the first systematic study comparing results obtained with various neutrino treatments, the presence of turbulent viscosity and different grid resolutions. We find that the time of BH formation after merger is heavily affected by grid resolution and turbulent viscosity. An early BH formation limits matter ejection from the accretion disc, as the BH swallows a significant portion of it. Our results indicate that more reliable kilonova light curves are obtained only if the various ejecta components are present. Moreover, robust r-process nucleosynthesis yields require inclusion of both neutrino emission and reabsorption in simulations. Advanced neutrino schemes and turbulent viscosity in simulations resolved beyond current standards appear necessary for reliable astrophysical predictions. To carry out computationally demanding simulations of growing complexity, next-generation NR codes that can efficiently leverage the latest pre-exascale many-core and heterogeneous infrastructures are required. To this end we develop GR-Athena++, a new dynamical spacetime solver built on top of Athena++, that shows high-order convergence properties and excellent parallel scalability up to O(105) cores in full 3D binary black hole (BBH) merger simulations. Finally we present GR-AthenaK, the first performance-portable spacetime solver, obtained by refactoring GR-Athena++ with the Kokkos programming model. We demonstrate the correctness and convergence properties of GR-AthenaK with BBH runs on GPUs. GR-AthenaK shows a speedup ∼50 on one GPU compared to GR-Athena++ on a single CPU core

Orbiting black-hole binaries and apparent horizons in higher dimensions

We study gravitational wave emission and the structure and formation of apparent horizons in orbiting black-hole binary systems in higher-dimensional general relativity. For this purpose we present an apparent horizon finder for use in higher dimensional numerical simulations and test the finder's accuracy and consistency in single and binary black-hole spacetimes. The black-hole binaries we model in $D=6$ dimensions complete up to about one orbit before merging or scatter off each other without formation of a common horizon. In agreement with the absence of stable circular geodesic orbits around higher-dimensional black holes, we do not find binaries completing multiple orbits without finetuning of the initial data. All binaries radiate about $0.13\,\%$ to $0.2\,\%$ of the total mass-energy in gravitational waves, over an order of magnitude below the radiated energy measured for four-dimensional binaries. The low radiative efficiency is accompanied by relatively slow dynamics of the binaries as expected from the more rapid falloff of the binding gravitational force in higher dimensions

Black-hole head-on collisions in higher dimensions

The collision of black holes and the emission of gravitational radiation in higher-dimensional spacetimes are of interest in various research areas, including the gauge-gravity duality, the TeV gravity scenarios evoked for the explanation of the hierarchy problem, and the large-dimensionality limit of general relativity. We present numerical simulations of head-on collisions of nonspinning, unequal-mass black holes starting from rest in general relativity with 4 ≤ D ≤ 10 spacetime dimensions. We compare the energy and linear momentum radiated in gravitational waves with perturbative predictions in the extreme mass ratio limit, demonstrating the strength and limitations of black-hole perturbation theory in this context

Extraction of gravitational-wave energy in higher dimensional numerical relativity using the Weyl tensor

© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd. Gravitational waves are one of the most important diagnostic tools in the analysis of strong-gravity dynamics and have been turned into an observational channel with LIGO's detection of GW150914. Aside from their importance in astrophysics, black holes and compact matter distributions have also assumed a central role in many other branches of physics. These applications often involve spacetimes with D > 4 dimensions where the calculation of gravitational waves is more involved than in the four dimensional case, but has now become possible thanks to substantial progress in the theoretical study of general relativity in D > 4. Here, we develop a numerical implementation of the formalism by Godazgar and Reall [1] - based on projections of the Weyl tensor analogous to the Newman-Penrose scalars - that allows for the calculation of gravitational waves in higher dimensional spacetimes with rotational symmetry. We apply and test this method in black-hole head-on collisions from rest in D = 6 spacetime dimensions and find that a fraction of the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner mass is radiated away from the system, in excellent agreement with literature results based on the Kodama-Ishibashi perturbation technique. The method presented here complements the perturbative approach by automatically including contributions from all multipoles rather than computing the energy content of individual multipoles.This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkŁodowska-Curie grant agreement No 690904, from H2020-ERC-2014-CoG Grant No. 'MaGRaTh' 646597, from STFC Consolidator Grant No. ST/L000636/1, the SDSC Comet, PSC-Bridges and TACC Stampede clusters through NSF-XSEDE Award Nos. PHY-090003, the Cambridge High Performance Computing Service Supercomputer Darwin using Strategic Research Infrastructure Funding from the HEFCE and the STFC, and DiRAC's Cosmos Shared Memory system through BIS Grant No. ST/J005673/1 and STFC Grant Nos. ST/H008586/1, ST/K00333X/1. WGC is supported by a STFC studentship

Numerical simulations of neutron star - black hole mergers

Collisions of black holes and neutron stars, named mixed binaries in the following, are interesting because of at least two reasons. Firstly, it is expected that they emit a large amount of energy as gravitational waves, which could be measured by new detectors. The form of those waves is expected to carry information about the internal structure of such systems. Secondly, collisions of such objects are the prime suspects of short gamma ray bursts. The exact mechanism for the energy emission is unknown so far...thesi