2009/02/28 by Scott E. Field, Jan S. Hesthaven, Stephen R. Lau · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Seismic Imaging and Inversion Techniques #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0264-9381/26/16/165010
published as Class.Quant.Grav.26:165010,2009 · Revised in response to referees' reports. Several minus sign errors corrected, and improved tables. Uses revtex4, 27 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables
openalex publication_date 2009/08/03 · arxiv created 2009/08/12 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Gravitational wave emission from extreme mass ratio binaries (EMRBs) should be detectable by the joint NASA-ESA LISA project, spurring interest in analytical and numerical methods for investigating EMRBs. We describe a discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method for solving the distributionally forced 1+1 wave equations which arise when modeling EMRBs via the perturbation theory of Schwarzschild black holes. Despite the presence of jump discontinuities in the relevant polar and axial gravitational `master functions', our dG method achieves global spectral accuracy, provided that we know the instantaneous position, velocity and acceleration of the small particle. Here these variables are known, since we assume that the particle follows a timelike geodesic of the Schwarzschild geometry. We document the results of several numerical experiments testing our method, and in our concluding section discuss the possible inclusion of gravitational self-force effects.