Applications of the characteristic formalism in relativity

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• Nigel Bishop (Rhodes University, South Africa)
• Wednesday 24 April 2013, 14:00-15:00
• Muirhead 112.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ilya Mandel.

Numerical relativity is most commonly formulated by foliating spacetime into hypersurfaces of constant time, and constructing equations that evolve data from one time slice to the next. Alternatively, in the characteristic approach, coordinates are constructed based on outgoing light cones, and the evolution is from one light cone to the next. The method has particular advantages in the accurate computation of gravitational radiation. Another application is cosmology, since nearly all cosmological data is a result of observations on our past light cone. It is in principle possible to use observed data and compute the past behaviour of the universe, and such codes have been implemented. The charactersitic approach can also be used to construct linearized Einstein equations by means of which gravitational radiation can be calculated analytically.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Seminars series.

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• Astrophysics Seminars
• Muirhead 112
• What's on in Physics?

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