Numerical Relativity
Coalescences of astrophysical binary compact objects, such as black-holes of all masses and/or neutron stars, are among the strongest and most interesting sources of gravitational radiation. The violence of the collision whips space itself into wild vibrations, e.g. Gravitational Waves (GWs). These GWs race outwards from the collision with the speed of light, carrying huge amounts of energy. GWs have thus far not been directly observed, but LIGO is on the verge of detecting GWs from compact stellar-mass binaries, and LISA is being designed to detect GWs from coalescing supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which reside at the core of most galaxies.
Numerical Relativity (NR) and/or gravitational wave source modeling concern the modeling and simulation of black-hole and/or neutron star binaries. The past few years have witnessed several breakthroughs in NR, and the decades old problem of simulating the coalescence of black-hole binaries in fully relativistic, strong-field gravity, which is described by Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR), has now been solved opening new frontiers in gravitational astrophysics.
In particular, the moving punctures approach, inroduced by CCRG group members, Campanelli, Lousto and Zlochower, has already produced many interesting calculations and predictions on dynamical phenomena that result from the GWs emission in the final stages of the mergers of two or more black holes. Among these results is the discovery of large gravitational-radiation recoils (up to 4000 km/s) from spinning supermassive black hole binaries, the study of spin dynamics effects, such as spin-flips, precession and hang-up orbits. Some of these results may produce significant electromagnetic signatures in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and hence be relevant for the interpretation and analysis of astronomical observational data.
This research is supported by NSF grants PHY-0722315, PHY-0653303, PHY-0714388, and PHY-0722703 and a NASA grant 07-ATFP07-0158.
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