A Numerical Study of Boson Star Binaries

Understand

This thesis describes a numerical study of binary boson stars within the context of an approximation to general relativity.

• The approximation we adopt places certain restrictions on the dynamical variables of general relativity (conformal flatness of the 3-metric), and on the time-slicing of the spacetime (maximal slicing).
• The resulting modeling problem requires the solution of a coupled nonlinear system of 4 hyperbolic, and 5 elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in three space dimensions and time.
• We approximately solve this system as an initial-boundary value problem, using finite difference techniques and well known, computationally efficient numerical algorithms such as the multigrid method in the case of the elliptic equations.