The status of numerical relativity

Abstract

Numerical relativity has come a long way in the last three decades and is now reaching a state of maturity. We are gaining a deeper understanding of the fundamental theoretical issues related to the field, from the well posedness of the Cauchy problem, to better gauge conditions, improved boundary treatment, and more realistic initial data. There has also been important work both in numerical methods and software engineering. All these developments have come together to allow the construction of several advanced fully three-dimensional codes capable of dealing with both matter and black holes. In this manuscript I make a brief review the current status of the field.Comment: Report on plenary talk at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR17), held at Dublin, Ireland, july 2004. Latex, 20 pages, 5 figure