A Reinvestigation of Moving Punctured Black Holes with a New Code

TL;DR

This paper presents a new code for black hole simulations using the moving puncture method, demonstrating stable evolutions, introducing a novel gauge condition, and validating results against existing studies.

Contribution

The authors develop and test a new numerical relativity code with a novel gauge condition, improving stability and accuracy in black hole simulations.

Findings

Stable evolution of static and moving black holes achieved.

Discovery of a new gauge condition for black hole simulations.

Simulation results agree with previous research and clarify formulation ambiguities.

Abstract

We report on our code, in which the moving puncture method is applied and an adaptive/fixed mesh refinement is implemented, and on its preliminary performance on black hole simulations. Based on the BSSN formulation, up-to-date gauge conditions and the modifications of the formulation are also implemented and tested. In this work we present our primary results about the simulation of a single static black hole, of a moving single black hole, and of the head-on collision of a binary black hole system. For the static punctured black hole simulations, different modifications of the BSSN formulation are applied. It is demonstrated that both the currently used sets of modifications lead to a stable evolution. For cases of a moving punctured black hole with or without spin, we search for viable gauge conditions and study the effect of spin on the black hole evolution. Our results confirm previous results obtained by other research groups. In addition, we find a new gauge condition, which has not yet been adopted by any other researchers, which can also give stable and accurate black hole evolution calculations. We examine the performance of the code for the head-on collision of a binary black hole system, and the agreement of the gravitational waveform it produces with that obtained in other works. In order to understand qualitatively the influence of matter on the binary black hole collisions, we also investigate the same head-on collision scenarios but perturbed by a scalar field. The numerical simulations performed with this code not only give stable and accurate results that are consistent with the works by other numerical relativity groups, but also lead to the discovery of a new viable gauge condition, as well as clarify some ambiguities in the modification of the BSSN formulation.