This is the companion website to the paper "Dynamical descalarization in binary black hole mergers" by Hector O. Silva, Helvi Witek, Matthew Elley and Nicolás Yunes and published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 127 031101 (2021). We show movies of our simulations, together with short descriptions.
Our simulations were made with the Canuda library, in combination with the Einstein Toolkit. We used matplotlib and PyCactus to create the visualizations.
Dynamics of the scalar field and Gauss-Bonnet invariant, in the x-y plane, sourced by black holes colliding head on. \(m_1\) (\(m_2\) ) denotes the mass of black hole initially at right (left) and \(\beta_2\) is the coupling. We show the amplitude of \(\rm{log}_{10}|\Phi|\) (color map) together with the Gauss-Bonnet invariant (isocurvature levels). The isocurvature levels correspond to \(1 M^{-4}\) (solid line), \(1/10 M^{-4}\) (dashed line), \(1/100 M^{-4}\) (dot-dashed line) and \(1/1000 M^{-4}\) (dotted line).
Case (a): \(q = m_1 / m_2 = 1\) and \(\beta_2 = 0\).
Case (b): \(q = m_1 / m_2 = 1/2\) and \(\beta_2 = 0.16125\).
Case (c): \(q = m_1 / m_2 = 1\) and \(\beta_2 = 0.36281\).
Case (d): \(q = m_1 / m_2 = 1\) and \(\beta_2 = 1.45123\).
Dynamics of the scalar field and Gauss-Bonnet invariant of inspiraling binary black holes in the equatorial plane. The mass ratio is \(q=m_1 / m_2 = 1\) and the coupling is \(\beta_2=0.36281\). We show the amplitude of \(\rm{log}_{10}|\Phi|\) (color map) together with the Gauss-Bonnet invariant (isocurvature levels). The isocurvature levels correspond to \(1 M^{-4}\) (solid line), \(1/10 M^{-4}\) (dashed line), \(1/100 M^{-4}\) (dot-dashed line) and \(1/1000 M^{-4}\) (dotted line).
H.W. acknowledges financial support provided by the NSF Grant No. OAC-2004879, the Royal Society University Research Fellowship Grant No. UF160547 and the Royal Society Research Grant No. RGF\R1\180073. H.O.S and N.Y. acknowledge financial support through NSF grants No. PHY-1759615, PHY-1949838 and NASA ATP Grant No. 17-ATP17-0225, No. NNX16AB98G and No. 80NSSC17M0041. We acknowledge the computer resources and the technical support provided by the Leibniz Supercomputing Center via PRACE Grant No. 2018194669 "FunPhysGW: Fundamental Physics in the era of gravitational waves" and by the DiRAC Consortium via STFC DiRAC Grants No. ACTP186 and ACSP218. This work made use of the Illinois Campus Cluster, a computing resource that is operated by the Illinois Campus ClusterProgram (ICCP) in conjunction with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and which is supported by funds from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.