General relativistic force-free electrodynamics with a discontinuous Galerkin-finite difference hybrid method

Abstract

Relativistic plasmas around compact objects can sometimes be approximated as being force-free. In this limit, the plasma inertia is negligible and the overall dynamics is governed by global electric currents. We present a novel numerical approach for simulating such force-free plasmas, which allows for high accuracy in smooth regions as well as capturing dissipation in current sheets. Using a high-order accurate discontinuous Galerkin method augmented with a conservative finite-difference method, we demonstrate efficient global simulations of black hole and neutron star magnetospheres. In addition to a series of challenging test problems, we show that our approach can-depending on the physical properties of the system and the numerical implementation-be up to 10x more efficient than conventional simulations, with a speedup of 2-3x for most problems we consider in practice.