Simulating Black Hole Formation with the Discontinuous Galerkin Method

Critical phenomena in gravitational collapse involves the study of what occurs at the threshold between black hole formation and field dispersal. Most notably, this phenomena provides an interesting test of cosmic censorship. Computationally, these simulations provide many challenges that the Discontinuous Galerkin Method (DG) may be well suited to address. DG, when compared to Finite Difference Methods (FD), is able to achieve higher accuracy with fewer degrees of freedom and need fewer time steps in tests with the classic example of massless scalar field collapse. Some results are presented from a forthcoming paper.