Coordinates and boundary conditions for the general relativistic initial data problem

Techniques for numerically constructing initial data in the 3+1 formalism of general relativity (GR) are studied, using the theoretical framework described in Bowen and York (1980), Physical Review D 21(8), 2047-2056. The two main assumptions made are maximal slicing and 3-conformal flatness of the generated spaces. For ease of numerical solution, axisymmetry is also assumed, but all the results should extend without difficulty to the non-axisymmetric case. The numerical code described in this thesis may be used to construct vacuum spaces containing arbitrary numbers of black holes, each with freely specifyable (subject to the axisymmetry assumption) position, mass, linear momentum, and angular momentum. It should be emphasised that the time evolution of these spaces has not yet been attempted. There are two significant innovations in this work: the use of a new boundary condition for the surfaces of the black holes, and the use of multiple coordinate patches in the numerical solution. The new boundary condition studied herein requires the inner boundary of the numerical grid to be a marginally trapped surface. This is in contrast to the approach used in much previous work on this problem area, which requires the constructed spaces to be conformally isometric under a "reflection mapping" which interchanges the interior of a specified black hole with the remainder of the space. The new boundary condition is found to be easy to implement, even for multiple black holes. It may also prove useful in time evolution problems. The coordinate choice scheme introduced in this thesis uses multiple coordinate patches in the numerical solution, each with a coordinate system suited to the local physical symmetries of the region of space it covers. Because each patch need only cover part of the space, the metrics on the individual patches can be kept simple, while the overall patch system still covers a complicated topology. The patches are linked together by interpolation across the interpatch boundaries. Bilinear interpolation suffices to give accuracy comparable with that of common second order difference schemes used in numerical GR. This use of multiple coordinate patches is found to work very well in both one and two black hole models, and should generalise to a wide variety of other numerical GR problems. Patches are also found to be a useful (if somewhat over-general) way of introducing spatially varying grid sizes into the numerical code. However, problems may arise when trying to use multiple patches in time evolution problems, in that the interpatch boundaries must not become spurious generators or reflectors of gravitational radiation, due to the interpolation errors. These problems have not yet been studied. The code described in this thesis is tested against Schwarzschild models and against previously published work using the Bowen and York formalism, reproducing the latter within the limits of error of the codes involved. A number of new spaces containing one and two black holes with linear or angular momentum are also constructed to demonstrate the code, although little analysis of these spaces has yet been done.