Seminars in the Section of AAM

Numerical General Relativistic Resistive Magnetohydrodynamics

10 Jan 2013
Kiriaki Dionisopoulou
Albert-Einstein-Institute, Max-Planck-Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam
14:00 Observatory Lab A.U.Th.

Abstract:

A wide variety of astrophysical phenomena around compact objects, such as neutron stars, black holes, etc, involve dynamical and strong electromagnetic fields. In regions where the electromagnetic fields dominate and/or the magnetic field lines reconnect the ideal-MHD approximation breaks down and it is not suitable to describe the physical properties of the system under consideration. Under these conditions, to properly describe the system we need a more general approach which allows for resistive effects to be taken into account. Therefore, we have developed a generalized code, based on the "Whisky" code, to solve the resistive magnetohydrodynamics equations in GR numerically. Our methods exploit the properties of Implicit/Explicit Runge-Kutta schemes and allows for a special treatment of the stiff terms that appear in the equations. The numerical results we obtain for a number of numerical tests in both dynamical and non-dynamical spacetimes, prove the accuracy of our code and that it can be employed in order to study more realistic and complicated phenomena near compact objects, such as jets, magnetosphere instabilities, etc.

© 2018 SCHOOL OF PHYSICS, AUTH.