Scalar fields in numerical general relativity : inhomogeneous inflation and bubble collapse

• Main Author: Clough, Katherine Ann
• Other Authors: Lim, Eugene ; Sakellariadou, Maria
• Published: King's College London (University of London) 2017
• Subjects: 530.11
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.718546

Einstein’s field equation of General Relativity (GR) has been known for over 100 years, yet it remains challenging to solve analytically in strongly relativistic regimes, particularly where there is a lack of a priori symmetry. Numerical Relativity (NR) - the evolution of the Einstein Equations using a computer - is now a relatively mature tool which enables such cases to be explored. In this thesis, a description is given of the development and application of a new Numerical Relativity code, GRChombo. GRChombo uses the standard BSSN formalism, incorporating full adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and massive parallelism via the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The AMR capability permits the study of physics which has previously been computationally infeasible in a full 3 + 1 setting. The functionality of the code is described, its performance characteristics are demonstrated, and it is shown that it can stably and accurately evolve standard spacetimes such as black hole mergers. We use GRChombo to study the effects of inhomogeneous initial conditions on the robustness of small and large field inflationary models. We find that small field inflation can fail in the presence of subdominant scalar gradient energies, suggesting that it is much less robust than large field inflation. We show that increasing initial gradients will not form sufficiently massive inflation-ending black holes if the initial hypersurface is approximately flat. Finally, we consider the large field case with a varying extrinsic curvature K, and find that part of the spacetime remains inflationary if the spacetime is open, which confirms previous theoretical studies. We investigate the critical behaviour which occurs in the collapse of both spherically symmetric and asymmetric scalar field bubbles. We use a minimally coupled scalar field subject to a “double well” interaction potential, with the bubble wall spanning the barrier between two degenerate minima. We find that the symmetric and asymmetric cases exhibit Type 2 critical behaviour with the critical index consistent with a value of γ = 0.37 for the dominant unstable mode. We do not see strong evidence of echoing in the solutions, which is probably due to being too far from the critical point to properly observe the critical solution. We suggest areas for improvement and further study, and other applications.