| The goal of this dissertation is to develop a generally covariant Hamiltonian approach to the generalized harmonic formulation of general relativity. As en route investigations, an important class of coordinate transformations in the context of the 3 + 1 decomposition, foliation preserving transformations, is defined; transformation rules of various 3 + 1 decomposition variables under this change of coordinates are investigated; the notion of covariant time derivative under foliation preserving transformations is defined; gauge conditions of various numerical relativity formulations are rewritten in generally covariant form. The Hamiltonian formulation of the generalized harmonic system is defined in the latter part of this dissertation. With the knowledge of covariant time derivative, the Hamiltonian formulation is extended to achieve general covariance. The Hamiltonian formulation is further proved to be symmetric hyperbolic. |
