Numerical Relativity simulations in the advanced detector era

Eliu Huerta Escudero, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Ian Hinder, Roland Haas, Bhanu Agarwal, Eliu Huerta Escudero, Daniel George, Erik Wessel, Stuart Anderson, Edgar Fajardo Hernandez, Diyu Luo, Wei Ren, Justin Ellis, A. Miguel Holgado, Stephen Taylor, Michael Usachenko, Daniel Johnson

Numerical Relativity (NR) has provided key insights on the physics that takes place when ultra compact objects spiral into each other and eventually coalesce. This information has been used to develop models for the detection of gravitational wave  (GW) sources, and to train GW detection pipelines that are now being used by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) Collaboration. 

NR is playing a key role in the identification of potential GW candidates during the advanced LIGO era. When GW candidates are reported by low-latency GW detection pipelines, parameter estimation codes are used to constrain the parameters of the events. Thereafter, NR simulations are generated to find out whether the features of the detected waveforms are accurately predicted by general relativity.  Since the description of GW sources spans a deep parameter space – 2D for the masses, 6D for the spins, 1D for precession, 1D for eccentricity – it is unfeasible to try to construct a catalog of NR simulations that can cover any possible combination of parameters. Thus, it is crucial to be able to generate new NR simulations in a timely manner when new events are reported. In order to contribute to this effort, we propose to use the open source code the Einstein Toolkit, which is particularly suited to be used with advanced cyber-infrastructure facilities such as Blue Waters.