Collisional N-body Simulations of Large-N Star Clusters

Sourav Chatterjee, Northwestern University

Usage Details

Modeling of massive and dense star clusters has become important especially after the detection of gravitational waves (GW) from merging black holes (BH) by the LIGO detector(s). Modern numerical simulations show that dense star clusters are efficient factories of BH binaries similar to the inferred source of the detected GW. These studies also show that the rate of BH-mergers that produce detectable GWs, increases with the cluster mass, which is directly proportional to the number of stars (N) in the clusters. Using our Hénon-type Monte Carlo code CMC, parallelized using MPI, we will perform collisional N-body simulations with N up to 5x10⁷ (more than an order of magnitude higher N than other studies) to model very high-mass globular clusters, and nuclear star clusters commonly found in centers of galaxies. CMC is rigorously tested using our own computer cluster Quest with much lower N. These scaled up simulations will use between 10³ to 10⁴ cores on Blue Waters.