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Phys. Rev. D 76, 081503(R) (2007) [5 pages]

Excision without excision

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David Brown1, Olivier Sarbach2, Erik Schnetter3,4, Manuel Tiglio3,4,7, Peter Diener3,4, Ian Hawke5, and Denis Pollney6
1Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA
2Instituto de Física y Matemáticas, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia, Michoacán, México
3Center for Computation & Technology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
4Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
5School of Mathematics, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
6Albert-Einstein-Institut, Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Golm, Germany
7Department of Physics, and Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA

Received 20 July 2007; published 29 October 2007

to turducken (turduckens, turduckening, turduckened, turduckened) [math.]: To stuff a black hole. We analyze and apply an alternative to black hole excision based on smoothing the interior of black holes with arbitrary initial data, and solving the vacuum Einstein evolution equations everywhere. By deriving the constraint propagation system for our hyperbolic formulation of the BSSN evolution system we rigorously prove that the constraints propagate causally and so any constraint violations introduced inside the black holes cannot affect the exterior spacetime. We present evolutions of Cook-Pfeiffer binary black hole initial configurations showing that these techniques appear to work robustly for generic data. We also present evidence from spherically symmetric evolutions that for the gauge conditions used the same stationary end-state is approached irrespective of the choice of initial data and smoothing procedure.

© 2007 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.76.081503
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.76.081503
PACS:
04.70.−s, 04.25.Dm, 04.30.Db