Simulations of the Einstein-Maxwell system

Electromagnetism plays an important role in a variety of applications in gravity. To that end, in this talk, we present an implementation of the Maxwell equations within the adaptive-mesh pseudospectral numerical relativity code \textsc{bamps}. We present a thorough analysis of the evolution equations as a first order symmetric hyperbolic system of PDEs, including the construction of the characteristic variables for use in our penalty boundary communication scheme, and radiation, constraint preserving outer boundary conditions which, in the language of Kreiss-Agranovich-Metivier, are shown to be boundary-stable.

After presenting a formulation of the Maxwell constraints that we may solve for initial data, we move on to present a suite of numerical tests. Our simulations, both within the Cowling approximation, and in full non-linear evolution, demonstrate rapid convergence of error with resolution, as well as consistency with known quasinormal decay rates on the Kerr background. Finally we present evolutions of the electrovacuum equations of motion with strong data, a good representation of typical critical collapse runs.