arXiv subjects

Hyun Lim

Publications and source records attributed to Hyun Lim.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Nonlinear Stability of Kerr-Sen Black Holes in Merging Binaries

We investigate the stability of Kerr-Sen black holes, which arise in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton-axion theory. Within a numerical relativity framework, we perform head-on binary black hole simulations with approximate initial data across a portion of the parameter space. We find that for nontrivial electric charge, a dilaton field persists through merger and that in the presence of spin, the remnant will also retain an axion field. The persistence of these fields for long times after merger strongly suggests the stability of these black holes within this alternative gravity theory. We further test whether initially unscalarized black holes will acquire hair in the presence of a scalar background. We find that black holes immersed in such a background retain scalar hair. Furthermore, we find that even initially unscalarized Kerr-Newman black holes will scalarize and remain scalarized throughout the evolution.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

Numerical Investigations of Stable Dynamics in the Presence of Ghosts

We explore the nonlinear dynamics of classical field theories containing ghost degrees of freedom, focusing on two coupled scalar fields with opposite kinetic terms in (1+1) and (2+1) dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Using a spacetime finite element formulation, we perform a systematic numerical study across a broad class of initial data. We find that ghost-normal systems can exhibit long-lived, dynamically bounded evolution over extended time intervals, with stability strongly controlled by spectral content and amplitude. Ultraviolet-dominated and small-amplitude configurations remain stable significantly longer than infrared-dominated or large-amplitude data, indicating that instability is mediated by nonlinear spectral energy transfer rather than instantaneous runaway. Nonlinear self-interactions play a dual role: while they can accelerate energy exchange between sectors, certain potentials, including a lifted $\phi^6$ interaction supporting oscillon-like structures, generate transient metastable regimes that partially suppress ghost-induced growth. Our results demonstrate that the dynamical consequences of ghost modes in classical field theory depend sensitively on dispersion, nonlinearity, and phase structure, revealing a richer metastability landscape than commonly assumed.

math.DS↗

arXiv2025

HARD: A Performance Portable Radiation Hydrodynamics Code based on FleCSI Framework

Hydrodynamics And Radiation Diffusion} (HARD) is an open-source application for high-performance simulations of compressible hydrodynamics with radiation-diffusion coupling. Built on the FleCSI (Flexible Computational Science Infrastructure) framework, HARD expresses its computational units as tasks whose execution can be orchestrated by multiple back-end runtimes, including Legion, MPI, and HPX. Node-level parallelism is delegated to Kokkos, providing a single, portable code base that runs efficiently on laptops, small homogeneous clusters, and the largest heterogeneous supercomputers currently available. To ensure scientific reliability, HARD includes a regression-test suite that automatically reproduces canonical verification problems such as the Sod and LeBlanc shock tubes and the Sedov blast wave, comparing numerical solutions against known analytical results. The project is distributed under an OSI-approved license, hosted on GitHub, and accompanied by reproducible build scripts and continuous integration workflows. This combination of performance portability, verification infrastructure, and community-focused development makes HARD a sustainable platform for advancing radiation hydrodynamics research across multiple domains.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2025

Black-hole binaries and waveforms in Quadratic Gravity

We report on the first numerical-relativity simulations of black-hole binaries that deviate from General Relativity due to quadratic-curvature corrections. Said theory of Quadratic Gravity propagates additional massive modes and admits both Kerr and non-Kerr black-hole solutions. We chose the respective masses "at threshold", i.e., such that (at least) one of the black holes dynamically transitions from the Kerr to the non-Kerr branch during the early inspiral. The subsequent waveforms differ from their General Relativity counterparts throughout inspiral, merger, and ringdown.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2023

Waveform Modelling for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will usher in a new era in gravitational-wave astronomy. As the first anticipated space-based gravitational-wave detector, it will expand our view to the millihertz gravitational-wave sky, where a spectacular variety of interesting new sources abound: from millions of ultra-compact binaries in our Galaxy, to mergers of massive black holes at cosmological distances; from the beginnings of inspirals that will venture into the ground-based detectors' view to the death spiral of compact objects into massive black holes, and many sources in between. Central to realising LISA's discovery potential are waveform models, the theoretical and phenomenological predictions of the pattern of gravitational waves that these sources emit. This white paper is presented on behalf of the Waveform Working Group for the LISA Consortium. It provides a review of the current state of waveform models for LISA sources, and describes the significant challenges that must yet be overcome.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2023

Nonlinear Evolution of Quadratic Gravity in 3+1 Dimensions

We present a numerically stable system of (3+1) evolution equations for the nonlinear gravitational dynamics of quadratic-curvature corrections to General Relativity (Quadratic Gravity). We also report on the numerical implementation of these evolution equations. We recover a well-known linear instability and gather evidence that -- aside from said instability -- Quadratic Gravity exhibits a physically stable Ricci-flat subsector. In particular, we demonstrate that Teukolsky-wave perturbations of a Schwarzschild black hole as well as a full binary inspiral (evolved up to merger) remain Ricci flat throughout evolution. This suggests that, at least in vacuum, classical Quadratic Gravity can mimic General Relativity, even in the fully nonlinear strong-gravity regime.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2022

Modeling Solids in Nuclear Astrophysics with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a frequently applied tool in computational astrophysics to solve the fluid dynamics equations governing the systems under study. For some problems, for example when involving asteroids and asteroid impacts, the additional inclusion of material strength is necessary in order to accurately describe the dynamics. In compact stars, that is white dwarfs and neutron stars, solid components are also present. Neutron stars have a solid crust which is the strongest material known in nature. However, their dynamical evolution, when modeled via SPH or other computational fluid dynamics codes, is usually described as a purely fluid dynamics problem. Here, we present the first 3D simulations of neutron-star crustal toroidal oscillations including material strength with the Los Alamos National Laboratory SPH code FleCSPH. In the first half of the paper, we present the numerical implementation of solid material modeling together with standard tests. The second half is on the simulation of crustal oscillations in the fundamental toroidal mode. Here, we dedicate a large fraction of the paper to approaches which can suppress numerical noise in the solid. If not minimized, the latter can dominate the crustal motion in the simulations.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

Realistic Kilonova Up Close

Neutron star mergers are cosmic catastrophes that produce some of the most energetic observed phenomena: short gamma-ray bursts, gravitational wave signals, and kilonovae. The latter are optical transients, powered by radioactive nuclides which are synthesized when the neutron-rich ejecta of a disrupted neutron star undergoes decompression. We model this decompression phase using data from simulations of post-merger accretion disk winds. We use smoothed particle hydrodynamics with realistic nuclear heating to model the expansion over multiple scales, from initially several thousand km to billions of km. We then render a realistic image of a kilonova ejecta as it would appear for a nearby observer. This is the first time such a visualization is performed using input from state-of-the-art accretion disk simulations, nuclear physics and atomic physics. The volume rendering in our model computes an opacity transfer function on the basis of the physical opacity, varying significantly with the inhomogeneity of the neutron richness in the ejecta. Other physical quantities such as temperature or electron fraction can be visualized using an independent color transfer function. We discuss several difficulties with the ParaView application that we encountered during the visualization process, and give descriptions of our solutions and workarounds which could be used for future improvements.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Conservation of Angular Momentum in the Fast Multipole Method

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is positioned as having ideal conservation properties. When properly implemented, conservation of total mass, energy, and both linear and angular momentum is guaranteed exactly, up to machine precision. This is particularly important for some applications in computational astrophysics, such as binary dynamics, mergers, and accretion of compact objects (neutron stars, black holes, and white dwarfs). However, in astrophysical applications that require the inclusion of gravity, calculating pairwise particle interactions becomes prohibitively expensive. In the Fast Multipole Method (FMM), they are, therefore, replaced with symmetric interactions between distant clusters of particles (contained in the tree nodes) Although such an algorithm is linear momentum-conserving, it introduces spurious torques that violate conservation of angular momentum. We present a modification of FMM that is free of spurious torques and conserves angular momentum explicitly. The new method has practically no computational overhead compared to the standard FMM.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

Modeling Neutron Star Oscillations in a Fixed General Relativistic Background Including Solid Crust Dynamics

Measurements of the gravitational-wave signals from neutron star mergers allow scientists to learn about the interior of neutron stars and the properties of dense nuclear matter. The study of neutron star mergers is usually performed with computational fluid dynamics codes, mostly in Eulerian but also in Lagrangian formulation such as smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). Codes include our best knowledge of nuclear matter in the form of an equation of state as well as effects of general relativity (GR). However, one important aspect of neutron stars is usually ignored: the solid nature of their crust. The solid matter in the crust is the strongest material known in nature which could lead to a multitude of possible observational effects that have not been studied in dynamical simulations yet. The crust could change the way a neutron star deforms during a merger, leaving an imprint in the gravitational wave signal. It could even shatter during the inspiral, producing a potentially observable electromagnetic signal. Here, we present a first study of the dynamical behavior of neutron stars with a solid crust and fixed GR background with FleCSPH. FleCSPH is a general-purpose SPH code, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It features an efficient algorithm for gravitational interactions via the Fast Multipole Method, which, together with the implemented nuclear equation of state, makes it appropriate for astrophysical applications. The solid material dynamics is described via the elastic-perfectly plastic model with maximum-strain breaking. Despite its simplicity, the model reproduces the stress-strain curve of crustal material as extracted from microphysical simulations very well. We present first tests of our implementation via simulations of neutron star oscillations and give an outlook on our study of the dynamical behavior of the solid crust in neutron star merger events.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

Nonlinear Dynamics of Quadratic Gravity in Spherical Symmetry

We present the first numerically stable nonlinear evolution for the leading-order gravitational effective field theory (Quadratic Gravity) in the spherically-symmetric sector. The formulation relies on (i) harmonic gauge to cast the evolution system into quasi-linear form (ii) the Cartoon method to reduce to spherical symmetry in keeping with harmonic gauge, and (iii) order-reduction to 1st-order (in time) by means of introducing auxiliary variables. Well-posedness of the respective initial-value problem is numerically confirmed by evolving randomly perturbed flat-space and black-hole initial data. Our study serves as a proof-of-principle for the possibility of stable numerical evolution in the presence of higher derivatives.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2021

A Spacetime Finite Elements Method to Solve the Dirac Equation

In this work, a fully implicit numerical approach based on space-time finite element method is presented to solve the Dirac equation in 1 (space) + 1 (time), 2 + 1, and 3 + 1 dimensions. We utilize PETSc/Tao library to implement our linear system and for using Krylov subspace based solvers such as GMRES. We demonstrate our method by analyzing several different cases including plane wave solution, Zitterbewegung, and Klein paradox. Parallel performance of this implementation is also presented.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2020

FleCSPH: The Next Generation FleCSIble Parallel Computational Infrastructure for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

FleCSPH is a smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation tool, based on the compile-time configurable framework FleCSI. The asynchronous distributed tree topology combined with a fast multipole method allows FleCSPH to efficiently compute hydrodynamics and long range particle-particle interactions. FleCSPH provides initial data generators, particle relaxation techniques, and standard evolution drivers, which can be easily modified and extended to user-specific setups. Data input/output uses the H5part format, compatible with modern visualization software.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2018

Massively Parallel Simulations of Binary Black Hole Intermediate-Mass-Ratio Inspirals

We present a highly-scalable framework that targets problems of interest to the numerical relativity and broader astrophysics communities. This framework combines a parallel octree-refined adaptive mesh with a wavelet adaptive multiresolution and a physics module to solve the Einstein equations of general relativity in the BSSN formulation. The goal of this work is to perform advanced, massively parallel numerical simulations of Intermediate Mass Ratio Inspirals (IMRIs) of binary black holes with mass ratios on the order of 100:1. These studies will be used to generate waveforms as used in LIGO data analysis and to calibrate semi-analytical approximate methods. Our framework consists of a distributed memory octree-based adaptive meshing framework in conjunction with a node-local code generator. The code generator makes our code portable across different architectures. The equations corresponding to the target application are written in symbolic notation and generators for different architectures can be added independent of the application. Additionally, this symbolic interface also makes our code extensible, and as such has been designed to easily accommodate many existing algorithms in astrophysics for plasma dynamics and radiation hydrodynamics. Our adaptive meshing algorithms and data-structures have been optimized for modern architectures with deep memory hierarchies. This enables our framework to have achieve excellent performance and scalability on modern leadership architectures. We demonstrate excellent weak scalability up to 131K cores on ORNL's Titan for binary mergers for mass ratios up to 100.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2014

A Study of Space-Time Discretizations for the Dirac Equation

We study several numerical discretization techniques for the one-space plus one-time dimensional Dirac equation, including finite difference and space-time finite element methods. Two finite difference schemes and several space-time finite elements function spaces are analyzed with respect to known analytic solutions. Further we propose a finite element discretization along the equations' characteristic lines, creating diamond-shaped elements in the space-time plane. We show that the diamond shaped elements allow for physically intuitive boundary conditions, improve numerical efficiency, and reduce the overall error of the computed solution as compared to the other finite difference and space-time finite element discretizations studied in this paper.

math.NA↗

arXiv2014

Exploring Critical Collapse in the Semilinear Wave Equation using Space-Time Finite Elements

A fully implicit numerical approach based on the space-time finite element method is implemented for the semilinear wave equation in 1(space) + 1(time) and 2 + 1 dimensions to explore critical collapse and search for self-similar solutions. Previous work studied this behavior by exploring the threshold of singularity formation using time marching finite difference techniques while this work introduces an adaptive time parallel numerical method to the problem. The semilinear wave equation with a $p = 7$ term is examined in spherical symmetry. The impact of mesh refinement and the time additive Schwarz preconditioner in conjunction with Krylov Subspace Methods are examined.

gr-qc↗