The review is organized as follows. Section 2 contains a derivation of the equations of special relativistic (perfect) fluid dynamics, as well as a discussion of their main properties. In Section 3 the most recent developments in numerical methods for SRHD are reviewed paying particular attention to high-resolution shock-capturing methods.
We have focussed on those aspects of the numerical methods more specific of SRHD, i.e., the discussion of relativistic Riemann solvers and the computation of numerical fluxes. Some comments about the extension to multi-dimensional flows are included in Section 9 (see below).
Other developments in special relativistic numerical hydrodynamics are discussed in Section 4. Numerical results obtained with different methods as well as analytical solutions for several test problems are presented in Section 6. Two astrophysical applications of SRHD are discussed in Section 7. An evaluation of the various numerical methods is given in Section 8 together with an outlook for future developments. Finally, some additional technical information including the incorporation of general equations of state is presented in Section 9.
The reader is assumed to have basic knowledge in
classical [153, 62] and relativistic
fluid dynamics [274, 8
], as well as in
finite difference/volume methods for partial differential
equations [236, 214]. A discussion of modern
finite volume methods for hyperbolic systems of conservation laws
can be found, e.g., in [158
, 161
, 154
]. The theory of
spectral methods for fluid dynamics is developed in [42], and smoothed particle
hydrodynamics is reviewed in [199
].