Developing Tools for Multimessenger Gravitational Wave Astronomy
Abstract
We present work in progress to craft open-sourced numerical tools that will enable the calculation of electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waveforms: the GiRaFFE (General Relativistic Force-Free Electrodynamics) code. GiRaFFE numerically solves the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics system of equations in the force-free limit, to model the magnetospheres surrounding compact binaries, in order (1) to characterize the nonlinear interaction between the source and its surrounding magnetosphere, and (2) to evaluate the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational waves, including the production of collimated jets. We apply this code to various configurations of spinning black holes immersed in external magnetic field, in order to both test our implementation, and to explore the effect of strong gravitational field, high spins and of misalignment between the magnetic field lines an black hole spin, on the electromagnetic output and the collimation of Poynting jets. We will extend our work to collisions of black holes immersed in external magnetic field, which are prime candidates for coincident detection in both gravitational and electromagnetic spectra.
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