ITR: MHD Simulations in Full General Relativity

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Under this award, numerical tools will be developed for thestudy of astrophysical systems involving relativisticgravity, strong electromagnetic fields, and rotation. Thesetools will include computer codes for evolving fluids andelectromagnetic fields in a fixed gravitational field, codesfor evolving the relativistic gravitational field itself,and a combined code that will evolve gravitational fieldswith both material and electromagnetic sources. Tools forverifying the accuracy of the integrations will also bedeveloped. The codes will be optimized for use on thelatest generation of supercomputers, publicly released, andmade available within the scientific community. In thecourse of developing these codes, computational scientistswill be trained at the undergraduate, graduate, andpostdoctoral levels. The codes will also be applied by thedevelopers to problems at the forefront of astrophysics andgravitation physics research.This work is motivated by a number of astrophysical systems,including: accreting black holes and neutron stars;coalescing binary neutron stars and black holes; rapidlyrotating neutron stars formed in core-collapse supernovae;and collapsing supermassive stars. Taken together, theseobjects are the focus of a large fraction of currentastrophysical research. They are the likely source ofdetectable gravitational waves, powerful X-ray emission, andgamma-ray bursts. So far, however, they have resistedunderstanding because the underlying physics of the fluid,the electromagnetic field, and the gravitational field iscomplicated, nonlinear, and time dependent. Only numericalintegrations can unlock the fundamental physics of blackhole accretion, test scenarios for the generation ofgamma-ray bursts, and generate more accurate predictions forgravitational waveforms from coalescing compact binaries.The required numerical methods do not yet exist; they willbe developed under this award.