Recent Developments
The Caltech-Cornell collaboration has produced a computer code
which can simulate the motion of pairs of black holes or neutron
stars with very high accuracy, and great computational efficiency.
SXS members continue to extract scientific information from the
simulations, and use this information to further our understanding
of black-hole physics, and to improve techniques for finding the
signals in gravitational-wave detector data.
Boundary Conditions
SXS members have used very large and highly accurate simulations to test various types of boundary conditions for relativistic simulations. They have compared freezing, Sommerfeld, and Kreiss-Winicour constraint-preserving boundary conditions, along with sponge layers and spatial compactification. They report their results in a recent paper.
Constraint Damping
Caltech grad student Rob Owen has developed a new formulation of Einstein's equations. His system generalizes the KST system, to include constraint-damping terms, while preserving hyperbolicity of the evolution equations.
Hydrodynamics
Members of the Cornell group have been developing techniques to combine the accuracy of spectral techniques used to simulate spacetime with the robustness of finite differencing methods to simulate fluids—such as neutron stars. The report on their ideas in this paper.
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