A fast apparent horizon finder for three-dimensional Cartesian grids in numerical relativity

Abstract: In 3+1 numerical simulations of dynamic black hole spacetimes, it's useful to be able to find the apparent horizon(s) (AH) in each slice of a time evolution. A number of AH finders are available, but they often take many minutes to run, so they're too slow to be practically usable at each time step. Here I present a new AH finder,_AHFinderDirect_, which is very fast and accurate: at typical resolutions it takes only a few seconds to find an AH to

s i m 1 0^{- 5} m

accuracy on a GHz-class processor. I assume that an AH to be searched for is a Strahlk"orper (star-shaped region) with respect to some local origin, and so parameterize the AH shape by

r = h (a n g l e)

for some single-valued function

h : S^{2} o R e^{+}

. The AH equation then becomes a nonlinear elliptic PDE in

h

on

S^{2}

, whose coefficients are algebraic functions of

g_{i j}

,

K_{i j}

, and the Cartesian-coordinate spatial derivatives of

g_{i j}

. I discretize

S^{2}

using 6 angular patches (one each in the neighborhood of the

p m x

,

p m y

, and

p m z

axes) to avoid coordinate singularities, and finite difference the AH equation in the angular coordinates using 4th order finite differencing. I solve the resulting system of nonlinear algebraic equations (for

h

at the angular grid points) by Newton's method, using a "symbolic differentiation" technique to compute the Jacobian matrix._AHFinderDirect_ is implemented as a thorn in the_Cactus_ computational toolkit, and is freely available by anonymous CVS checkout.

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