RUI: Next-Generation Numerical Relativity for Future Gravitational-Wave Observatories

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This award supports research in relativity and relativistic astrophysics, and it addresses the priority areas of NSF's "Windows on the Universe" Big Idea. Gravitational waves are ripples of warped spacetime that travel through the universe at the speed of light. They are emitted by the most cataclysmic events in the universe, such as colliding black holes and neutron stars. Today's gravitational-wave observatories have given humanity an entirely new sense to learn about the universe, but they are only sensitive enough to detect the loudest gravitational waves. The next generation of gravitational-wave detectors will reach to the edge of the observable universe and will observe the loudest gravitational waves with extremely high fidelity. This award will help scientists recover the most exciting and surprising physics from these high-fidelity observations. Specifically, this award supports a research program that uses supercomputer calculations to model gravitational waves from merging black holes. Through their participation in this project, undergraduate and master's students at California State University, Fullerton, a Hispanic-serving institution, will play important roles in gravitational-wave astronomy while learning research and computational skills that will prepare them for successful STEM careers. The PI and student researchers will integrate results from this work into a week-long workshop; the workshop will introduce students from Citrus College (a local Hispanic-serving community college) to gravitational waves, high-performance computing, and undergraduate research.This award renews support for California State University, Fullerton's computational gravitational-wave research program. The PI and students at the undergraduate and master's level, working as members of the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes collaboration, will play key roles in preparing for the application of numerical-relativity modeling to next-generation gravitational-wave observations. First, they will assess the accuracy and performance limits of the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC), a state-of-the-art numerical-relativity code, to determine how well it can model future detectors' loudest observations, which will have signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in the thousands. Second, they will explore the potential for SpECTRE, a next-generation, open-source numerical-relativity code, to model high-SNR observations of merging black holes. They will complete the first assessment of SpECTRE's accuracy, efficiency, and scaling while contributing toward enabling SpECTRE's first simulations of binary black holes. The high-accuracy model gravitational waveforms resulting from this work will help develop improved analytic approximate models necessary for inferring the properties of gravitational-wave sources and for testing general relativity under the most extreme conditions. This work will also reveal the potential of next-generation techniques to model merging black holes while laying a foundation for using them to model black holes tearing apart neutron stars. High-fidelity observations of these events will reveal, with unprecedented fidelity, the behavior of the universe's densest matter and most strongly warped spacetime—but they will require model waveforms with tremendously improved accuracy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.