Collaborative Research: Simulating Neutron Star-Black Hole Inspiral: From Binaries to Accretion and Jets

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An accreting black hole binary system (ABHB) consists of a starorbiting a small black hole. One particularly interesting exampleis a neutron star-black hole (NS-BH) binary, which may be interestingsources of gravitational waves for gravitational wave observatories suchas Advanced LIGO. The gravitational and electromagnetic wave signalsfrom NS-BH binaries contains information about the particular evolution ofthe binary, including magnetic effects and the disruption of the neutronstar by the tidal forces of the black hole.This award supports the development of computational infrastructure andtechniques to study ABHBs and related systems. This includes the furtherdevelopment of HAD, a freely available, modular computational toolkit forsolving differential equations in a distributed parallel environment. HADprovides sophisticated adaptive mesh refinement capabilities, which allowthe user to combine different types of differential equations and/ornumerical methods. Techniques for solving the Einstein equations andmagnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations will be further developed andimplemented in the code to meet the demands of simulating ABHB systems andextracting valuable physical information. This work serves to advance numerical techniques for an important scientificproblem, as well as the creation and dissemination of advanced tools fordistributed computing. The modular design of the infrastructure allowsother researchers to share and extend these tools. Finally, this studyinvolves the training of postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, andundergraduates.