Well posed constraint-preserving boundary conditions for the linearized Einstein equations

TL;DR

This paper develops well-posed, constraint-preserving boundary conditions for the linearized Einstein equations around Minkowski space, ensuring stable evolution of metric and constraint variables in numerical relativity simulations.

Contribution

It introduces boundary conditions for the linearized Einstein equations that preserve constraints and ensure well-posedness, including for non-smooth boundaries.

Findings

Boundary conditions that preserve constraints are well-posed.

The techniques are applicable to non-smooth boundaries.

Potential extension to non-linear Einstein equations.

Abstract

In the Cauchy problem of general relativity one considers initial data that satisfies certain constraints. The evolution equations guarantee that the evolved variables will satisfy the constraints at later instants of time. This is only true within the domain of dependence of the initial data. If one wishes to consider situations where the evolutions are studied for longer intervals than the size of the domain of dependence, as is usually the case in three dimensional numerical relativity, one needs to give boundary data. The boundary data should be specified in such a way that the constraints are satisfied everywhere, at all times. In this paper we address this problem for the case of general relativity linearized around Minkowski space using the generalized Einstein-Christoffel symmetric hyperbolic system of evolution equations. We study the evolution equations for the constraints, specify boundary conditions for them that make them well posed and further choose these boundary conditions in such a way that the evolution equations for the metric variables are also well posed. We also consider the case of a manifold with a non-smooth boundary, as is the usual case of the cubic boxes commonly used in numerical relativity. The techniques discussed should be applicable to more general cases, as linearizations around more complicated backgrounds, and may be used to establish well posedness in the full non-linear case.