Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Numerical Analysis And Gravity, Tyler D. Knowles

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

In this dissertation we apply techniques of numerical analysis to current questions related to understanding gravity. The first question is that of sources of gravitational waves: how can we accurately determine the intrinsic physical parameters of a binary system whose late inspiral and merger was detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In particular, state-of-the-art algorithms for producing theoretical waveforms are as many as three orders of magnitude too slow for timely analysis. We show that direct software optimization produces a two order of magnitude speedup. We also describe documentation efforts undertaken so that the software may be rewritten to …