Physics

In this talk I will introduce the Fully Constrained Formulation (FCF) of General Relativity. In this formulation one has a hyperbolic sector and an elliptic one. The constraint equations are solved in each time step and are encoded in the elliptic sector; this set of equations have to be solved to compute initial data even if a free evolution scheme is used for a posterior dynamical evolution. Other formulations (like the XCTS formulation) share a similar elliptic sector. I will comment about the local uniqueness issue of the elliptic sector in the FCF. I will also described briefly the hyperbolic sector. I will finish with some recent reformulation of the equations which keeps the good properties of the local uniqueness, improves the numerical accuracy of the system and gives some additional information.

The Event Horizon Telescope is a global effort to construct an
Earth-sized virtual radio telescope array, with the goal to make pictures and
movies of two nearby supermassive black holes. A detailed theoretical
understanding of black hole accretion is now crucial to interpret these
observations. I will review our current efforts to model polarimetric
properties of light produced in synchrotron processes in plasma falling
towards the event horizon. The numerical models are based on general
relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations so they are capable of capturing
the complex dynamics of magnetic fields and their interactions with plasma. It is now
important to understand the polarized radiative transfer in these simulations
to correctly predict the observational signatures of the events at the event
horizon scales where the accretion disk and jet are connected.