(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-08-27)
Evans, Christopher William
Black holes have long fascinated both physicists and the general population alike. In an astrophysical context, black holes participate in interesting interactions with not only stars, but also other black holes. Moreover, the recent detections of gravitational waves from both black hole-black hole and black hole-neutron star systems have only served to amplify excitement in the field of black hole astrophysics. Over the last few decades, numerical relativity has come to be a versatile tool for studying both of these classes of encounter. In this thesis, I present a collection of numerical relativity studies of black holes in the context of binary black hole mergers and tidal disruption events.