Three-dimensional adaptive evolution of gravitational waves in numerical relativity - art. no. 084039

Adaptive techniques are crucial for successful numerical modeling of gravit ational waves from astrophysical sources such as coalescing compact binarie s, since the radiation typically has wavelengths much larger than the scale of the sources. We have carried out an important step toward this goal: th e evolution of weak gravitational waves using adaptive mesh refinement in t he Einstein equations. The 2-level adaptive simulation is compared with uni grid runs at coarse and fine resolution, and is shown to track closely the features of the fine grid run.