TY - JOUR T1 - IMEX Evolution of Scalar Fields on Curved Backgrounds JO - Communications in Computational Physics VL - 5 SP - 1063 EP - 1094 PY - 2009 DA - 2009/06 SN - 6 DO - http://doi.org/ UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/cicp/7717.html KW - AB -

Inspiral of binary black holes occurs over a time-scale of many orbits, far longer than the dynamical time-scale of the individual black holes. Explicit evolutions of a binary system therefore require excessively many time-steps to capture interesting dynamics. We present a strategy to overcome the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition in such evolutions, one relying on modern implicit-explicit ODE solvers and multidomain spectral methods for elliptic equations. Our analysis considers the model problem of a forced scalar field propagating on a generic curved background. Nevertheless, we encounter and address a number of issues pertinent to the binary black hole problem in full general relativity. Specializing to the Schwarzschild geometry in Kerr-Schild coordinates, we document the results of several numerical experiments testing our strategy.