Lessons for adaptive mesh refinement in numerical relativity

Journal article

We demonstrate the flexibility and utility of the Berger-Rigoutsos adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) algorithm used in the open-source numerical relativity (NR) code GRChombo for generating gravitational waveforms from binary black-hole (BH) inspirals, and for studying other problems involving non-trivial matter configurations. We show that GRChombo can produce high quality binary BH waveforms through a code comparison with the established NR code Lean. We also discuss some of the technical challenges involved in making use of full AMR (as opposed to, e.g. moving box mesh refinement), including the numerical effects caused by using various refinement criteria when regridding. We suggest several ‘rules of thumb’ for when to use different tagging criteria for simulating a variety of physical phenomena. We demonstrate the use of these different criteria through example evolutions of a scalar field theory. Finally, we also review the current status and general capabilities of GRChombo.

Authors: Radia, M; Sperhake, U; Drew, A; Clough, K; Figueras, P

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Journal: Classical and Quantum Gravity
• Volume: 39
• Issue: 13
• Pages: 135006-135006
• Publication date: 2022-05-13
• DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/ac6fa9
• EISSN: 1361-6382
• ISSN: 0264-9381
• Language: English
• Keywords: Computer science; Theoretical physics; Computer graphics (images); Scalar (mathematics); Pure mathematics; Quantum mechanics; Algorithm; Numerical relativity; Geometry; Adaptive mesh refinement; Waveform; Programming language; Physics; General relativity; Binary number; Field (mathematics); Black hole (networking); Code (set theory); Polygon mesh; Theory of relativity