Frame-Dragging Vortexes and Tidal Tendexes Attached to Colliding Black Holes: Visualizing the Curvature of Spacetime

Creators: Owen, Robert; Brink, Jeandrew; Chen, Yanbei; Kaplan, Jeffrey D.; Lovelace, Geoffrey; Matthews, Keith D.; Nichols, David A.; Scheel, Mark A.; Zhang, Fan; Zimmerman, Aaron; Thorne, Kip S.

Abstract

When one splits spacetime into space plus time, the spacetime curvature (Weyl tensor) gets split into an "electric" part ε_(jk) that describes tidal gravity and a "magnetic" part B_(jk) that describes differential dragging of inertial frames. We introduce tools for visualizing B_(jk) (frame-drag vortex lines, their vorticity, and vortexes) and ε_(jk) (tidal tendex lines, their tendicity, and tendexes) and also visualizations of a black-hole horizon's (scalar) vorticity and tendicity. We use these tools to elucidate the nonlinear dynamics of curved spacetime in merging black-hole binaries.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 21 December 2010; published 11 April 2011. We thank Larry Kidder and Saul Teukolsky for helpful discussions. Our simulations have been performed by using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC) [19]. This research was supported by NSF Grants No. PHY-0601459, No. PHY-0653653, No. PHY-0960291, No. PHY- 0969111, and No. PHY-1005426 and CAREER Grant No. PHY-0956189, by NASA Grants No. NNX09AF97G and No. NNX09AF96G, and by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, the Brinson Foundation, and the David and Barbara Groce fund.

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