Collapse of Nonlinear Gravitational Waves in Moving-Puncture Coordinates

Understand

We study numerical evolutions of nonlinear gravitational waves in moving-puncture coordinates.

• We adopt two different types of initial data -- Brill and Teukolsky waves -- and evolve them with two independent codes producing consistent results.
• We find that Brill data fail to produce long-term evolutions for common choices of coordinates and parameters, unless the initial amplitude is small, while Teukolsky wave initial data lead to stable evolutions, at least for amplitudes sufficiently far from criticality.
• The critical amplitude separates initial data whose evolutions leave behind flat space from those that lead to a black hole.