2006/04/30 by Erik Schnetter, B. Krishnan, Badri Krishnan +1 · 6 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.74.024028
published as Phys.Rev. D74 (2006) 024028 · 20 pages, 16 figures, revtex4. Several smaller changes, some didactic content shortened
arxiv created 2006/06/06 · openalex publication_date 2006/07/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This paper presents a quasilocal method of studying the physics of dynamical black holes in numerical simulations. This is done within the dynamical horizon framework, which extends the earlier work on isolated horizons to time-dependent situations. In particular: (i) We locate various kinds of marginal surfaces and study their time evolution. An important ingredient is the calculation of the signature of the horizon, which can be either spacelike, timelike, or null. (ii) We generalize the calculation of the black hole mass and angular momentum, which were previously defined for axisymmetric isolated horizons to dynamical situations. (iii) We calculate the source multipole moments of the black hole which can be used to verify that the black hole settles down to a Kerr solution. (iv) We also study the fluxes of energy crossing the horizon, which describes how a black hole grows as it accretes matter and/or radiation. We describe our numerical implementation of these concepts and apply them to three specific test cases, namely, the axisymmetric head-on collision of two black holes, the axisymmetric collapse of a neutron star, and a nonaxisymmetric black hole collision with nonzero initial orbital angular momentum.