High-order discontinuous Galerkin schemes with subcell finite volume limiter and adaptive mesh refinement for a monolithic first-order BSSNOK formulation of the Einstein-Euler equations

We propose a high order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme with subcell finite volume (FV) limiter to solve a monolithic first-order hyperbolic Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura-Oohara-Kojima (BSSNOK) formulation of the coupled Einstein-Euler equations. The numerical scheme runs with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) in three space dimensions, is endowed with time-accurate local time stepping (LTS) and is able to deal with both conservative and nonconservative hyperbolic systems. The system of governing partial differential equations was shown to be strongly hyperbolic and is solved in a monolithic fashion with one numerical framework that can be simultaneously applied to both the conservative matter subsystem as well as the nonconservative subsystem for the spacetime. Since high order unlimited DG schemes are well known to produce spurious oscillations in the presence of discontinuities and singularities, our subcell finite volume limiter is crucial for the robust discretization of shock waves arising in the matter as well as for the stable treatment of puncture black holes. We test the new method on a set of classical test problems of numerical general relativity, showing good agreement with available exact or numerical reference solutions. In particular, we perform the first long term evolution of the inspiralling merger of two puncture black holes with a high order Arbitrary high order schemes using derivatives (ADER-DG) scheme.