Shells around black holes: The effect of freely specifiable quantities in Einstein’s constraint equations

We solve Einstein’s constraint equations in the conformal thin-sandwich decomposition to model thin shells of noninteracting particles in circular orbit about a nonrotating black hole. We use these simple models to explore the effects of some of the freely specifiable quantities in this decomposition on the physical content of the solutions. Specifically, we adopt either maximal slicing or Kerr-Schild slicing, and make different choices for the value of the lapse on the black hole horizon. For one particular choice of these quantities the resulting equations can be solved analytically; for all others we construct numerical solutions. We find that these different choices have no effect on our solutions when they are expressed in terms of gauge-invariant quantities.