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We introduce hp-greedy, a refinement approach for building gravitational wave surrogates as an extension of the standard reduced basis framework. Our proposal is data-driven, with a domain decomposition of the parameter space, local reduced basis, and a binary tree as the resulting structure, which are obtained in an automated way. When compared to the standard global reduced basis approach, the numerical simulations of our proposal show three salient features: i) representations of lower dimension with no loss of accuracy, ii) a significantly higher accuracy for a fixed maximum dimensionality of the basis, in some cases by orders of magnitude, and iii) results that depend on the reduced basis seed choice used by the refinement algorithm. We first illustrate the key parts of our approach with a toy model and then present a more realistic use case of gravitational waves emitted by the collision of two spinning, non-precessing black holes. We discuss performance aspects of hp-greedy, such as overfitting with respect to the depth of the tree structure, and other hyperparameter dependences. As two direct applications of the proposed hp-greedy refinement, we envision: i) a further acceleration of statistical inference, which might be complementary to focused reduced-order quadratures, and ii) the search of gravitational waves through clustering and nearest neighbors., 16 pages, code available from authors upon request

Using the Reduced Basis approach, we efficiently compress and accurately represent the space of waveforms for non-precessing binary black hole inspirals, which constitutes a four dimensional parameter space (two masses, two spin magnitudes). Compared to the non-spinning case, we find that only a {\it marginal} increase in the (already relatively small) number of reduced basis elements is required to represent any non-precessing waveform to nearly numerical round-off precision. Most parameters selected by the algorithm are near the boundary of the parameter space, leaving the bulk of its volume sparse. Our results suggest that the full eight dimensional space (two masses, two spin magnitudes, four spin orientation angles on the unit sphere) may be highly compressible and represented with very high accuracy by a remarkably small number of waveforms, thus providing some hope that the number of numerical relativity simulations of binary black hole coalescences needed to represent the entire space of configurations is not intractable. Finally, we find that the {\it distribution} of selected parameters is robust to different choices of seed values starting the algorithm, a property which should be useful for indicating parameters for numerical relativity simulations of binary black holes. In particular, we find that the mass ratios $m_1/m_2$ of non-spinning binaries selected by the algorithm are mostly in the interval $[1,3]$ and that the median of the distribution follows a power-law behavior $\sim (m_1/m_2)^{-5.25}$.

to turducken (turduckens, turduckening, turduckened, turduckened) [math.]: To stuff a black hole. We analyze and apply an alternative to black hole excision based on smoothing the interior of black holes with arbitrary - possibly constraint violating - initial data, and solving the vacuum Einstein evolution equations everywhere. By deriving the constraint propagation system for our hyperbolic formulation of the BSSN evolution system we rigorously prove that the constraints propagate causally and so any constraint violations introduced inside the black holes cannot affect the exterior spacetime. (This does not follow from the causal structure of the spacetime as is often assumed.) We present numerical evolutions of Cook-Pfeiffer binary black hole initial configurations showing that these techniques appear to work robustly for generic data. We also present numerical evidence from spherically symmetric evolutions that for the gauge conditions used the same stationary end-state is approached irrespective of the choice of initial data and smoothing procedure., 5 pages, 4 figures. Uses improved smoothing procedure for initial data. A free turduckening implementation is available from the authors by anonymous CVS from :pserver:cvs_anon@cvs.aei.mpg.de:/numrelcvs as AEIThorns/NoExcision; use the password "anon"

We construct new, efficient, and accurate high-order finite differencing operators which satisfy summation by parts. Since these operators are not uniquely defined, we consider several optimization criteria: minimizing the bandwidth, the truncation error on the boundary points, the spectral radius, or a combination of these. We examine in detail a set of operators that are up to tenth order accurate in the interior, and we surprisingly find that a combination of these optimizations can improve the operators' spectral radius and accuracy by orders of magnitude in certain cases. We also construct high-order dissipation operators that are compatible with these new finite difference operators and which are semi-definite with respect to the appropriate summation by parts scalar product. We test the stability and accuracy of these new difference and dissipation operators by evolving a three-dimensional scalar wave equation on a spherical domain consisting of seven blocks, each discretized with a structured grid, and connected through penalty boundary conditions., Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. The files with the coefficients for the derivative and dissipation operators can be accessed by downloading the source code for the document. The files are located in the "coeffs" subdirectory

Combining deeper insight of Einstein's equations with sophisticated numerical techniques promises the ability to construct accurate numerical implementations of these equations. We illustrate this in two examples, the numerical evolution of ``bubble'' and single black hole spacetimes. The former is chosen to demonstrate how accurate numerical solutions can answer open questions and even reveal unexpected phenomena. The latter illustrates some of the difficulties encountered in three-dimensional black hole simulations, and presents some possible remedies., Contribution to appear in the Proceedings of the March-2004 Heraeus Seminar in Bad Honnef (Eds D. Giulini, J. Frauendiener and V. Perlick)

Outer boundary conditions for strongly and symmetric hyperbolic formulations of 3D Einstein's field equations with a live gauge condition are discussed. The boundary conditions have the property that they ensure constraint propagation and control in a sense made precise in this article the physical degrees of freedom at the boundary. We use Fourier-Laplace transformation techniques to find necessary conditions for the well posedness of the resulting initial-boundary value problem and integrate the resulting three-dimensional nonlinear equations using a finite-differencing code. We obtain a set of constraint-preserving boundary conditions which pass a robust numerical stability test. We explicitly compare these new boundary conditions to standard, maximally dissipative ones through Brill wave evolutions. Our numerical results explicitly show that in the latter case the constraint variables, describing the violation of the constraints, do not converge to zero when resolution is increased while for the new boundary conditions, the constraint variables do decrease as resolution is increased. As an application, we inject pulses of ``gravitational radiation'' through the boundaries of an initially flat spacetime domain, with enough amplitude to generate strong fields and induce large curvature scalars, showing that our boundary conditions are robust enough to handle nonlinear dynamics. We expect our boundary conditions to be useful for improving the accuracy and stability of current binary black hole and binary neutron star simulations, for a successful implementation of characteristic or perturbative matching techniques, and other applications. We also discuss limitations of our approach and possible future directions., Comment: 31 pages, updated version, to appear in Journal of Hyperbolic Differential Equations

We discuss an equivalence between the Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura (BSSN) formulation of the Einstein evolution equations, a subfamiliy of the Kidder--Scheel--Teukolsky formulation, and other strongly or symmetric hyperbolic first order systems with fixed shift and densitized lapse. This allows us to show under which conditions the BSSN system is, in a sense to be discussed, hyperbolic. This desirable property may account in part for the empirically observed better behavior of the BSSN formulation in numerical evolutions involving black holes., Comment: 7 Pages, RevTex, no figures

Numerical codes based on a direct implementation of the standard ADM formulation of Einstein's equations have generally failed to provide long-term stable and convergent evolutions of black hole spacetimes when excision is used to remove the singularities. We show that, for the case of a single black hole in spherical symmetry, it is possible to circumvent these problems by adding to the evolution equations terms involving the constraints, thus adjusting the standard ADM system. We investigate the effect that the choice of the lapse and shift has on the stability properties of numerical simulations and thus on the form of the added constraint term. To facilitate this task, we introduce the concept of quasi well-posedness, a version of well-posedness suitable for ADM-like systems involving second-order spatial derivatives., 20 pages, 9 figures