Gregory Daues

The Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory: a science portal enabling community software development

Grid Portals, based on standard web technologies, are emerging as important and useful user interfaces to computational and data Grids. Grid Portals enable Virtual Organizations, comprised of distributed researchers to collaborate and access resources more efficiently and seamlessly. The Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory (ASC) Grid Portal provides a framework to enable researchers in the field of numerical relativity to study astrophysical phenomenon by making use of the Cactus computational toolkit. We examine user requirements and describe the design and implementation of the ASC Grid Portal.

The astrophysics simulation collaboratory portal: a framework for effective distributed research

We describe the motivation, architecture, and implementation of the Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory (ASC) portal. The ASC project provides a web-based problem solving framework for the astrophysics community that harnesses the capabilities of emerging computational grids.

Coordinate conditions in three-dimensional numerical relativity

We put forward a few ideas on coordinate (gauge) conditions in numerical relativity. Coordinate conditions are important for long time scale simulations of relativistic systems. We demonstrate the importance of, and propose methods for, the active enforcement of coordinate properties. In particular, the constancy of the determinant of the spatial 3-metric is investigated as such a property. We propose an exceedingly simple but powerful idea for implementing elliptic coordinate conditions that not only makes possible the use of complicated elliptic conditions, but is also a number of orders of magnitude more efficient than existing methods for large-scale three-dimensional simulations.

Evolution of 3D Boson Stars with Waveform Extraction

Numerical results from a study of boson stars under nonspherical perturbations using a fully general relativistic 3D code are presented together with the analysis of emitted gravitational radiation. We have constructed a simulation code suitable for the study of scalar fields in space-times of general symmetry by bringing together components for addressing the initial value problem, the full evolution system and the detection and analysis of gravitational waves. Within a series of numerical simulations, we explicitly extract the Zerilli and Newman–Penrose scalar Ψ4 gravitational waveforms when the stars are subjected to different types of perturbations. Boson star systems have rapidly decaying nonradial quasinormal modes and thus the complete gravitational waveform could be extracted for all configurations studied. The gravitational waves emitted from stable, critical and unstable boson star configurations are analysed and the numerically observed quasinormal mode frequencies are compared with known linear perturbation results. The superposition of the high frequency nonspherical modes on the lower frequency spherical modes was observed in the metric oscillations when perturbations with radial and nonradial components were applied. The collapse of unstable boson stars to black holes was simulated. The apparent horizons were observed to be slightly nonspherical when initially detected and became spherical as the system evolved. The application of nonradial perturbations proportional to spherical harmonics is observed not to affect the collapse time. An unstable star subjected to a large perturbation was observed to migrate to a stable configuration.

Numerical Simulations of Oscillating Soliton Stars: Excited States in Spherical Symmetry and Ground State Evolutions in 3D

Excited state soliton stars are studied numerically for the first time. The stability of spherically symmetric S-branch excited state oscillatons under radial perturbations is investigated using a 1D code. We find that these stars are inherently unstable either migrating to the ground state or collapsing to black holes. Higher excited state configurations are observed to cascade through intermediate excited states during their migration to the ground state. This is similar to excited state boson stars [J. Balakrishna, E. Seidel, and W.-M. Suen, Phys. Rev. D 58, 104004 (1998).]. Ground state oscillatons are then studied in full 3D numerical relativity. Finding the appropriate gauge condition for the dynamic oscillatons is much more challenging than in the case of boson stars. Different slicing conditions are explored, and a customized gauge condition that approximates polar slicing in spherical symmetry is implemented. Comparisons with 1D results and convergence tests are performed. The behavior of these stars under small axisymmetric perturbations is studied and gravitational waveforms are extracted. We find that the gravitational waves damp out on a short time scale, enabling us to obtain the complete waveform. This work is a starting point for the evolution of real scalar field systems with arbitrary symmetries.