Automated determination of the end time of junk radiation in binary black hole simulations

Understand

When numerically solving Einstein's equations for the evolution of binary black holes, physical imperfections in the initial data manifest as a transient, high-frequency pulse of ''junk radiation.'' This unphysical signal must be removed before the waveform can be used.

• Improvements in the efficiency of numerical simulations now allow waveform catalogs containing thousands of waveforms to be produced.
• Thus, an automated procedure for identifying junk radiation is required.
• To this end, we present a new algorithm based on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) from the Hilbert-Huang transform.