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Abstract

Slice stretching effects such as slice sucking and slice wrapping arise when foliating the extended Schwarzschild spacetime with maximal slices. For arbitrary spatial coordinates these effects are quantified here in the context of boundary conditions where the lapse arises as a linear combination of odd and even lapse. Favourable boundary conditions are then derived which make the overall slice stretching occur late in numerical simulations. Allowing the lapse to become negative, this requirement leads to lapse functions which approach at late times the odd lapse corresponding to the static Schwarzschild metric. Demanding, however, that a numerically favourable lapse remains non-negative, as a result the average of odd and even lapse is obtained. At late times the lapse with zero gradient at the puncture arising for the puncture evolution is precisely of this form. Finally, analytic arguments are given on how slice stretching effects can be avoided. Here the excision technique and the working mechanism of the shift function are studied in detail.