2018/03/21 by Tim Dietrich, Sebastiano Bernuzzi, Dietrich, Tim +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Magnetic confinement fusion research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1803.07965
The recent detection of gravitational waves and electromagnetic counterparts\nemitted during and after the collision of two neutron stars marks a\nbreakthrough in the field of multi-messenger astronomy. Numerical relativity\nsimulations are the only tool to describe the binary's merger dynamics in the\nregime when speeds are largest and gravity is strongest. In this work we report\nstate-of-the-art binary neutron star simulations for irrotational\n(non-spinning) and spinning configurations. The main use of these simulations\nis to model the gravitational-wave signal. Key numerical requirements are the\nunderstanding of the convergence properties of the numerical data and a\ndetailed error budget. The simulations have been performed on different HPC\nclusters, they use multiple grid resolutions, and are based on eccentricity\nreduced quasi-circular initial data. We obtain convergent waveforms with phase\nerrors of 0.5-1.5 rad accumulated over approximately 12 orbits to merger. The\nwaveforms have been used for the construction of a phenomenological waveform\nmodel which has been applied for the analysis of the recent binary neutron star\ndetection. Additionally, we show that the data can also be used to test other\nstate-of-the-art semi-analytical waveform models.\n