The minimal gauge is a hyperboloidal compactification promoted by Ansorg and Macedo. We demonstrate its various properties and explain its connection to Leaver’s continued fraction method for the computation of quasinormal modes of black holes.

This is the first installment of a three-piece series on Penrose diagrams and the associated conformal compactification procedure. This post is a technical how-to describing how I draw quantitatively accurate Penrose diagrams to illustrate the causal structure of time surfaces using free and open-source software.