Simulations of unequal-mass black hole binaries with spectral methods
-
1.
California Institute of Technology
-
2.
Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics
Abstract
This paper presents techniques and results for simulations of unequal-mass, nonspinning binary black holes with pseudospectral methods. Specifically, we develop an efficient root-finding procedure to ensure the black hole initial data have the desired masses and spins; we extend the dual coordinate frame method and eccentricity removal to asymmetric binaries. Furthermore, we describe techniques to simulate mergers of unequal-mass black holes. The second part of the paper presents numerical simulations of nonspinning binary black holes with mass ratios 2, 3, 4, and 6, covering between 15 and 22 orbits, merger and ringdown. We discuss the accuracy of these simulations, the evolution of the (initially zero) black hole spins, and the remnant black hole properties.
Additional Information
© 2012 American Physical Society. Received 14 June 2012; published 12 October 2012. We would like to thank Enrico Barausse, Duncan Brown, and Abdul Mroué for useful discussions, and Michael Boyle and Fan Zhang for performing wave extrapolations. We are also very grateful to the referee for his or her thorough reading and thoughtful suggestions. This work was supported in part by grants from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to Caltech and Cornell and by NSF Grants No. PHY-1068881 and No. PHY-1005655 and NASA Grant No. NNX09AF97G at Caltech. H. P. gratefully acknowledges support from the NSERC of Canada, from the Canada Research Chairs Program, and from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Computations were performed on the Syracuse University Gravitation and Relativity (SUGAR) Cluster, which is supported by Syracuse University and NSF Grant No. PHY-0600953; on the NSF XSEDE network under Grant No. TGPHY990007N; on the Zwicky cluster at Caltech, which is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by NSF Grant No. PHY-0960291; and on the GPC supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium [104]. SciNet is funded by: the Canada Foundation for Innovation under the auspices of Compute Canada; the Government of Ontario; Ontario Research Fund–Research Excellence; and the University of Toronto.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevD.86.084033.pdf
Files
PhysRevD.86.084033.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
- Eprint ID
- 35504
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20121116-090319031
Funding
- Sherman Fairchild Foundation
- NSF
- PHY-1068881
- NSF
- PHY-1005655
- NASA
- NNX09AF97G
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Canada Research Chairs Program
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR)
Dates
- Created
-
2012-11-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- TAPIR , Physics Department