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Binary black hole simulations and implicit time-stepping
Harald Pfeiffer
Department of Physics
Caltech
Abstract
Numerical simulations of black hole binaries have made tremendous
progress over the last years. The usefulness of such simulations is
limited by their tremendous computational cost, which ultimately
results from a separation of time-scales: Emission of gravitational
radiation drives the evolution of the binary toward smaller separation
and eventual merger. The time-scale for inspiral is far longer than
the dynamical time-scale of each black hole. Therefore, the currently
deployed explicit time-steppers are severely limited by Courant
instabilities. Implicit time-stepping algorithms provide an obvious
route around the Courant limit, thus offering a tremendous potential
to speed up the simulations. However, the complexity of Einstein's
equations make this a highly non-trivial endevour. This talk will
first present a general overview of the status of Black Hole
simulations, followed by a status report on the ongoing work
aimed at implementing modern implict/explicit (IMEX) evolution schemes
for Einstein's equations.
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