NHSE Software Catalog

Gravitational Wave Extraction

url

http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/haupt/bbh/PITT_CODES

description

http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/haupt/bbh/PITT_CODES/intro/pitt.html

abstract

Gravitational wave extraction is one of the important aspects of the
computational grand challenge program. There are two schools of thought
when it comes to implementing the extraction of gravitational waves from a
numerically generated spacetime. One way is to simply let the waves
propogate via standard Cauchy devolopment (evolving spatial surfaces
using the standard initial value formulation). One of the major drawbacks
with this method is that a very large computational grid is needed to allow
the waves to propogate far from the source.

The other way to study radiation far from the source is to use an initial value
formulation based on ``characteristic surfaces.'' This is the technique
developed by the Pittsburgh group. It
should be stressed that the code does not deal with gravitational waves.
The code evolves a scalar field on a flat, background, spacetime via the
standard linear wave equation. It is the hope of the Pittsburgh group that the
code will be generic enough to incorporate evolving gravitational waves
later.

keywords

cosmology; spacetime; gravitational interaction;
application program

contact

Tom Haupt / haupt@npac.syr.edu