NPAC Technical Report SCCS-681

Gravitational Wave Extraction - A Benchmark?

Tomasz Haupt, Mark Miller

Submitted October 30 1994


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 paper is a summary of the paper by Gomez et. al. It is written for computer scientists working on the computational grand challenge program ``Black Hole Binaries: Coalescence and Gravitational Radiation.''


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