Excision boundary conditions for the conformal metric

Abstract

Shibata, Ury\=u and Friedman recently suggested a new decomposition of Einstein's equations that is useful for constructing initial data. In contrast to previous decompositions, the conformal metric is no longer treated as a freely-specifiable variable, but rather is determined as a solution to the field equations. The new set of freely-specifiable variables includes only time-derivatives of metric quantities, which makes this decomposition very attractive for the construction of quasiequilibrium solutions. To date, this new formalism has only been used for binary neutron stars. Applications involving black holes require new boundary conditions for the conformal metric on the domain boundaries. In this paper we demonstrate how these boundary conditions follow naturally from the conformal geometry of the boundary surfaces and the inherent gauge freedom of the conformal metric.