Numerical simulations of Einstein's equations

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This award supports research in numerical simulations of binary compact objects (black holes and neutron stars) accurate and efficient enough to be used for parameter estimation of sources of gravitational wave signals to be measured by detectors such as LIGO.These simulations will also be used to calibrate and drive the construction of faithful semi-analytical gravitational wave templates for parameter estimation in (e.g.) LIGO data analysis. The main numerical techniques to be used for both black hole and neutron star simulations will behigh order and pseudo-spectral multi-domain methods. Special effort will be spent on methods for extending binary simulations of orbiting compact objects using these techniques all the way to the merger and ring-down regimes.This project will address current obstacles in the ability to study with very high accuracy the gravitational waves emitted by coalescing binary compact objects, by combining the application and development of novel analytical and numerical techniques. The final goal is to develop both numerical and semi-analytical models that can be used to infer the sources of gravitational waves from their detected signals. The results of this project will have a broad impact on areas of computational relativity, modeling and detection of gravitational waves, and will likely drive the development of some new numerical techniques, which should be useful in rather general fields of computational physics involving time-dependent problems.