Christian Reisswig

	Room: 0.60 Phone: +49 (0) 331 567 7179 Fax: +49 (0) 331 567 7298 email: (@aei.mpg.de) christian.reisswig

Research

I am a relativistic astrophysicist working in the field of Numerical Relativity. My research interest is focussed on binary black hole (BBH) simulations. In our group, we use supercomputers to evolve BBH initial data in vacuum spacetimes by employing finite difference discretization schemes of the full non-linear Einstein equations. Recent breakthroughs with regard to the analytical and numerical stability of the evolution system enable us to simulate large sets of BBH initial data configurations from the inspiral phase through the merger and the final ringdown phase. I am especially interested in running and analyzing our simulation data output to gain further insight into the astrophysics of black holes, e.g. kick velocities and final spin of the final merged black hole, and comparing the results with analytic (perturbative) methods as well as assessing the accuracy of gravitational wave extraction methods. Furthermore, I am involved in the development and improvement of our simulation code which is based on the Cactus Computational Toolkit and the Carpet adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) driver.


BBH initial configuration with AMR mesh representation of the z=0 slice of the lapse gauge function and apparent horizons (grey).	"+"-polarization of the dominant harmonic l=2, m=2 wavemode of a gravitational wave signal from a complete BBH merger simulation.	Visualization of the apparent horizons (red spheres) and the real part of the complex Weyl scalar Psi4 encoding the outgoing gravitational radiation field during a BBH merger simulation.