Ed Seidel
Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut

Using Supercomputers to Collide Black Holes (and other Cataclysms)

Abstract:

Einstein's equations of general relativity govern such exotic phenomena as black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves. Unfortunately they are among the most complex in physics, and require very large scale computational power - which we are just on the verge of achieving - to solve. I will motivate and describe the worldwide effort to develop advanced computational tools to solve these equations in their full generality for the first time since they were written down nearly a century ago, and will also describe the impact these efforts are having on other fields of computational science. I will also show movies of large scale simulations of black hole collisions and other cosmic events that may soon be seen for the first time by a worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors currently under construction.