Talk abstract details

Due to the pressing need to model astrophysical events which produce detectable amounts of gravitational radiation (numerically solving the Einstein field equations), presently, finding astrophysically realistic initial data is a rather ardent research topic.

The currently employed methods for constructing initial data - the so-called `conformal' methods, in particular, `conformal Thin-Sandwich' - do not allow to specify a physical system as freely as one would like, because the overall scales (such as mass or distance between objects) are found only after solving the equations.

In contrast, in the original `Thin-Sandwich' formulation of the constraint equations, once given the freely specifiable data, which here are physical data, the equations determine the foliation of the space-time. Although this formulation cannot be applied to construct asymptotically Euclidean initial data, it can be used for the construction of hyperboloidal initial data. This new method, which would provide a rather new avenue towards constructing initial data that are physically meaningful, is presented in this talk.