A Numerical Method for General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics

A Numerical Method for General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics

This paper describes the development and testing of a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) code to study ideal MHD in the fixed background of a Kerr black hole. The code is a direct extension of the hydrodynamic code of Hawley, Smarr, and Wilson, and uses Evans and Hawley constrained transport (CT) to evolve the magnetic fields. Two categories of test cases were undertaken. A one di...

HARM: A Numerical Scheme for General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics

We describe a conservative, shock-capturing scheme for evolving the equations of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics. The fluxes are calculated using the Harten, Lax, and van Leer scheme. A variant of constrained transport, proposed earlier by Tóth, is used to maintain a divergence free magnetic field. Only the covariant form of the metric in a coordinate basis is required to specify the ...

A new general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics code for dynamical spacetimes

We present a new numerical code that solves the general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamical (GRMHD) equations coupled to the Einstein equations for the evolution of a dynamical spacetime within a conformally-flat approximation. This code has been developed with the main objective of studying astrophysical scenarios in which both, high magnetic fields and strong gravitational fields appear, such...

General relativistic hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics: hyperbolic systems in relativistic astrophysics

Primitive Variable Solvers for Conservative General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics

Conservative numerical schemes for general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) require a method for transforming between “conserved” variables such as momentum and energy density and “primitive” variables such as restmass density, internal energy, and components of the four-velocity. The forward transformation (primitive to conserved) has a closed-form solution, but the inverse transforma...