A MODEL PROBLEM FOR THE INITIAL-BOUNDARY VALUE FORMULATION OF EINSTEIN'S FIELD EQUATIONS

Abstract

In many numerical implementations of the Cauchy formulation of Einstein's field equations one encounters artificial boundaries which raises the issue of specifying boundary conditions. Such conditions have to be chosen carefully. In particular, they should be compatible with the constraints, yield a well posed initial-boundary value formulation and incorporate some physically desirable properties like, for instance, minimizing reflections of gravitational radiation. Motivated by the problem in General Relativity, we analyze a model problem, consisting of a formulation of Maxwell's equations on a spatially compact region of space–time with timelike boundaries. The form in which the equations are written is such that their structure is very similar to the Einstein–Christoffel symmetric hyperbolic formulations of Einstein's field equations. For this model problem, we specify a family of Sommerfeld-type constraint-preserving boundary conditions and show that the resulting initial-boundary value formulations are well posed. We expect that these results can be generalized to the Einstein–Christoffel formulations of General Relativity, at least in the case of linearizations about a stationary background.