Moving black holes via singularity excision

Abstract

We present a singularity excision algorithm appropriate for numerical simulations of black holes moving throughout the computational domain. The method is an extension of the excision procedure previously used to obtain stable simulations of single, non-moving black holes. The excision procedure also shares elements used in recent work to study the dynamics of a scalarfield in the background of a single, boosted black hole. The robustness of our excision method is tested with single black-hole evolutions using a coordinate system in which the coordinate location of the black hole, and thus the excision boundary, moves throughout the computational domain.