PHYSICS SEMINAR
CODING THE GRAVITATIONAL COLLAPSE OF A 5D INSTANTON
Benjamin Constantineau
Physics Department
Bishop's University
Friday, October 30, 2009
1:30-2:30 pm
Nicolls 1
We are developing a C++ code to study the spherical gravitational collapse of a 5D instanton to a black hole. In the process, we track a function which is defined as a thermodynamic potential at late stages of the collapse. We achieved our preliminary objective of reproducing the numerical results found in the recent literature for static initial conditions, where the momentum conjugate to the Yang-Mills field is zero. In this talk, we will introduce the problem, the coupled nonlinear PDEs governing the evolution of the metric and matter fields, and how the initial state is obtained analytically via an expansion. We will then discuss the coding process: the method used, how a numerical instability was fixed, how the energy constraint revealed a mathematical error and finally, how the simulation time was reduced using a coordinate transformation.
