73 research outputs found
Dynamical damping terms for symmetry-seeking shift conditions
Suitable gauge conditions are fundamental for stable and accurate
numerical-relativity simulations of inspiralling compact binaries. A number of
well-studied conditions have been developed over the last decade for both the
lapse and the shift and these have been successfully used both in vacuum and
non-vacuum spacetimes when simulating binaries with comparable masses. At the
same time, recent evidence has emerged that the standard "Gamma-driver" shift
condition requires a careful and non-trivial tuning of its parameters to ensure
long-term stable evolutions of unequal-mass binaries. We present a novel gauge
condition in which the damping constant is promoted to be a dynamical variable
and the solution of an evolution equation. We show that this choice removes the
need for special tuning and provides a shift damping term which is free of
instabilities in our simulations and dynamically adapts to the individual
positions and masses of the binary black-hole system. Our gauge condition also
reduces the variations in the coordinate size of the apparent horizon of the
larger black hole and could therefore be useful when simulating binaries with
very small mass ratios.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
Matched Filtering of Numerical Relativity Templates of Spinning Binary Black Holes
Tremendous progress has been made towards the solution of the
binary-black-hole problem in numerical relativity. The waveforms produced by
numerical relativity will play a role in gravitational wave detection as either
test-beds for analytic template banks or as template banks themselves. As the
parameter space explored by numerical relativity expands, the importance of
quantifying the effect that each parameter has on first the detection of
gravitational waves and then the parameter estimation of their sources
increases. In light of this, we present a study of equal-mass, spinning
binary-black-hole evolutions through matched filtering techniques commonly used
in data analysis. We study how the match between two numerical waveforms varies
with numerical resolution, initial angular momentum of the black holes and the
inclination angle between the source and the detector. This study is limited by
the fact that the spinning black-hole-binaries are oriented axially and the
waveforms only contain approximately two and a half orbits before merger. We
find that for detection purposes, spinning black holes require the inclusion of
the higher harmonics in addition to the dominant mode, a condition that becomes
more important as the black-hole-spins increase. In addition, we conduct a
preliminary investigation of how well a template of fixed spin and inclination
angle can detect target templates of arbitrary spin and inclination for the
axial case considered here
Enriching the Symphony of Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Holes by Tuning Higher Harmonics
For the first time, we construct an inspiral-merger-ringdown waveform model
within the effective-one-body formalism for spinning, nonprecessing binary
black holes that includes gravitational modes beyond the dominant mode, specifically . Our multipolar
waveform model incorporates recent (resummed) post-Newtonian results for the
inspiral and information from 157 numerical-relativity simulations, and 13
waveforms from black-hole perturbation theory for the (plunge-)merger and
ringdown. We quantify the improved accuracy including higher-order modes by
computing the faithfulness of the waveform model against the
numerical-relativity waveforms used to construct the model. We define the
faithfulness as the match maximized over time, phase of arrival,
gravitational-wave polarization and sky position of the waveform model, and
averaged over binary orientation, gravitational-wave polarization and sky
position of the numerical-relativity waveform. When the waveform model contains
only the mode, we find that the averaged faithfulness to
numerical-relativity waveforms containing all modes with 5 ranges
from to for binaries with total mass (using
the Advanced LIGO's design noise curve). By contrast, when the
modes are also included in the model, the
faithfulness improves to for all but four configurations in the
numerical-relativity catalog, for which the faithfulness is greater than
. Using our results, we also develop also a (stand-alone) waveform
model for the merger-ringdown signal, calibrated to numerical-relativity
waveforms, which can be used to measure multiple quasi-normal modes. The
multipolar waveform model can be extended to include spin-precession, and will
be employed in upcoming observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Virgo.Comment: 28 page
Strong-Field Scattering of Two Black Holes: Numerics Versus Analytics
We probe the gravitational interaction of two black holes in the strong-field
regime by computing the scattering angle of hyperbolic-like, close
binary-black-hole encounters as a function of the impact parameter. The fully
general-relativistic result from numerical relativity is compared to two
analytic approximations: post-Newtonian theory and the effective-one-body
formalism. As the impact parameter decreases, so that black holes pass within a
few times their Schwarzschild radii, we find that the post-Newtonian prediction
becomes quite inaccurate, while the effective-one-body one keeps showing a good
agreement with numerical results. Because we have explored a regime which is
very different from the one considered so far with binaries in quasi-circular
orbits, our results open a new avenue to improve analytic representations of
the general-relativistic two-body Hamiltonian.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letter
Robustness of Binary Black Hole Mergers in the Presence of Spurious Radiation
We present an investigation into how sensitive the last orbits and merger of
binary black hole systems are to the presence of spurious radiation in the
initial data. Our numerical experiments consist of a binary black hole system
starting the last couple of orbits before merger with additional spurious
radiation centered at the origin and fixed initial angular momentum. As the
energy in the added spurious radiation increases, the binary is invariably
hardened for the cases we tested, i.e. the merger of the two black holes is
hastened. The change in merger time becomes significant when the additional
energy provided by the spurious radiation increases the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner
(ADM) mass of the spacetime by about 1%. While the final masses of the black
holes increase due to partial absorption of the radiation, the final spins
remain constant to within our numerical accuracy. We conjecture that the
spurious radiation is primarily increasing the eccentricity of the orbit and
secondarily increasing the mass of the black holes while propagating out to
infinity.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure
Falloff of the Weyl scalars in binary black hole spacetimes
The peeling theorem of general relativity predicts that the Weyl curvature
scalars Psi_n (n=0...4), when constructed from a suitable null tetrad in an
asymptotically flat spacetime, fall off asymptotically as r^(n-5) along
outgoing radial null geodesics. This leads to the interpretation of Psi_4 as
outgoing gravitational radiation at large distances from the source. We have
performed numerical simulations in full general relativity of a binary black
hole inspiral and merger, and have computed the Weyl scalars in the standard
tetrad used in numerical relativity. In contrast with previous results, we
observe that all the Weyl scalars fall off according to the predictions of the
theorem.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, published versio
Probing the Binary Black Hole Merger Regime with Scalar Perturbations
We present results obtained by scattering a scalar field off the curved
background of a coalescing binary black hole system. A massless scalar field is
evolved on a set of fixed backgrounds, each provided by a spatial hypersurface
generated numerically during a binary black hole merger. We show that the
scalar field scattered from the merger region exhibits quasinormal ringing once
a common apparent horizon surrounds the two black holes. This occurs earlier
than the onset of the perturbative regime as measured by the start of the
quasinormal ringing in the gravitational waveforms. We also use the scalar
quasinormal frequencies to associate a mass and a spin with each hypersurface,
and observe the compatibility of this measure with the horizon mass and spin
computed from the dynamical horizon framework.Comment: 10 Pages and 6 figure
From Physics Model to Results: An Optimizing Framework for Cross-Architecture Code Generation
Starting from a high-level problem description in terms of partial
differential equations using abstract tensor notation, the Chemora framework
discretizes, optimizes, and generates complete high performance codes for a
wide range of compute architectures. Chemora extends the capabilities of
Cactus, facilitating the usage of large-scale CPU/GPU systems in an efficient
manner for complex applications, without low-level code tuning. Chemora
achieves parallelism through MPI and multi-threading, combining OpenMP and
CUDA. Optimizations include high-level code transformations, efficient loop
traversal strategies, dynamically selected data and instruction cache usage
strategies, and JIT compilation of GPU code tailored to the problem
characteristics. The discretization is based on higher-order finite differences
on multi-block domains. Chemora's capabilities are demonstrated by simulations
of black hole collisions. This problem provides an acid test of the framework,
as the Einstein equations contain hundreds of variables and thousands of terms.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Scientific
Programmin
- …