Abstract and Applied Analysis
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 742040, 21 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/742040
Research Article

Constraint-Preserving Boundary Conditions for the Linearized Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura Formulation

Alexander M. Alekseenko

Department of Mathematics, California State University Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff street, Northridge, CA 91330, USA

Received 3 August 2007; Accepted 19 February 2008

Academic Editor: Norimichi Hirano

Copyright © 2008 Alexander M. Alekseenko. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We derive two sets of explicit homogeneous algebraic constraint-preserving boundary conditions for the second-order in time reduction of the linearized Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura (BSSN) system. Our second-order reduction involves components of the linearized extrinsic curvature only. An initial-boundary value problem for the original linearized BSSN system is formulated and the existence of the solution is proved using the properties of the reduced system. A treatment is proposed for the full nonlinear BSSN system to construct constraint-preserving boundary conditions without invoking the second order in time reduction. Energy estimates on the principal part of the BSSN system (which is first order in temporal and second order in spatial derivatives) are obtained. Generalizations to the case of nonhomogeneous boundary data are proposed.