No Arabic abstract
A number of astrophysical scenarios possess and preserve an overall cylindrical symmetry also when undergoing a catastrophic and nonlinear evolution. Exploiting such a symmetry, these processes can be studied through numerical-relativity simulations at smaller computational costs and at considerably larger spatial resolutions. We here present a new flux-conservative formulation of the relativistic hydrodynamics equations in cylindrical coordinates. By rearranging those terms in the equations which are the sources of the largest numerical errors, the new formulation yields a global truncation error which is one or more orders of magnitude smaller than those of alternative and commonly used formulations. We illustrate this through a series of numerical tests involving the evolution of oscillating spherical and rotating stars, as well as shock-tube tests.
A Riemann problem with prescribed initial conditions will produce one of three possible wave patterns corresponding to the propagation of the different discontinuities that will be produced once the system is allowed to relax. In general, when solving the Riemann problem numerically, the determination of the specific wave pattern produced is obtained through some initial guess which can be successively discarded or improved. We here discuss a new procedure, suitable for implementation in an exact Riemann solver in one dimension, which removes the initial ambiguity in the wave pattern. In particular we focus our attention on the relativistic velocity jump between the two initial states and use this to determine, through some analytic conditions, the wave pattern produced by the decay of the initial discontinuity. The exact Riemann problem is then solved by means of calculating the root of a nonlinear equation. Interestingly, in the case of two rarefaction waves, this root can even be found analytically. Our procedure is straightforward to implement numerically and improves the efficiency of numerical codes based on exact Riemann solvers.
We present a symmetric hyperbolic formulation of the Einstein equations in affine-null coordinates. Giannakopoulos et. al. (arXiv:2007.06419) recently showed that the most commonly numerically implemented formulations of the Einstein equations in affine-null coordinates (and other single-null coordinate systems) are only weakly-but not strongly-hyperbolic. By making use of the tetrad-based Newman-Penrose formalism, our formulation avoids the hyperbolicity problems of the formulations investigated by Giannakopoulos et. al. We discuss a potential application of our formulation for studying gravitational wave scattering.
We present in this paper a 4-dimensional formulation of the Newton equations for gravitation on a Lorentzian manifold, inspired from the 1+3 and 3+1 formalisms of general relativity. We first show that the freedom on the coordinate velocity of a general time-parametrised coordinate system with respect to a Galilean reference system is similar to the shift freedom in the 3+1-formalism of general relativity. This allows us to write Newtons theory as living in a 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold $M^N$. This manifold can be chosen to be curved depending on the dynamics of the Newtonian fluid. In this paper, we focus on a specific choice for $M^N$ leading to what we call the textit{1+3-Newton equations}. We show that these equations can be recovered from general relativity with a Newtonian limit performed in the rest frames of the relativistic fluid. The 1+3 formulation of the Newton equations along with the Newtonian limit we introduce also allow us to define a dictionary between Newtons theory and general relativity. This dictionary is defined in the rest frames of the dust fluid, i.e. a non-accelerating observer. A consequence of this is that it is only defined for irrotational fluids. As an example supporting the 1+3-Newton equations and our dictionary, we show that the parabolic free-fall solution in 1+3-Newton exactly translates into the Schwarzschild spacetime, and this without any approximations. The dictionary might then be an additional tool to test the validity of Newtonian solutions with respect to general relativity. It however needs to be further tested for non-vacuum, non-stationary and non-isolated Newtonian solutions, as well as to be adapted for rotational fluids. One of the main applications we consider for the 1+3 formulation of Newtons equations is to define new models suited for the study of backreaction and global topology in cosmology.
We extend our approach for the exact solution of the Riemann problem in relativistic hydrodynamics to the case in which the fluid velocity has components tangential to the initial discontinuity. As in one-dimensional flows, we here show that the wave-pattern produced in a multidimensional relativistic Riemann problem can be predicted entirely by examining the initial conditions. Our method is logically very simple and allows for a numerical implementation of an exact Riemann solver which is both straightforward and computationally efficient. The simplicity of the approach is also important for revealing special relativistic effects responsible for a smooth transition from one wave-pattern to another when the tangential velocities in the initial states are suitably varied. While the content of this paper is focussed on a flat spacetime, the local Lorentz invariance allows its use also in fully general relativistic calculations.
The dynamics of self-gravitating fluid bodies is described by the Euler-Einstein system of partial differential equations. The break-down of well-posedness on the fluid-vacuum interface remains a challenging open problem, which is manifested in simulations of oscillating or inspiraling binary neutron-stars. We formulate and implement a well-posed canonical hydrodynamic scheme, suitable for neutron-star simulations in numerical general relativity. The scheme uses a variational principle by Carter-Lichnerowicz stating that barotropic fluid motions are conformally geodesic and Helmholtzs third theorem stating that initially irrotational flows remain irrotational. We apply this scheme in 3+1 numerical general relativity to evolve the canonical momentum of a fluid element via the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. We explore a regularization scheme for the Euler equations, that uses a fiducial atmosphere in hydrostatic equilibrium and allows the pressure to vanish, while preserving strong hyperbolicity on the vacuum boundary. The new regularization scheme resolves a larger number of radial oscillation modes compared to standard, non-equilibrium atmosphere treatments.