  A set of energy-momentum constraint-preserving boundary conditions is
proposed for the first-order Z4 case. The stability of a simple numerical
implementation is tested in the linear regime (robust stability test), both
with the standard corner and vertex treatment and with a modified
finite-differences stencil for boundary points which avoids corners and
vertices even in cartesian-like grids. Moreover, the proposed boundary
conditions are tested in a strong field scenario, the Gowdy waves metric,
showing the expected rate of convergence. The accumulated amount of
energy-momentum constraint violations is similar or even smaller than the one
generated by either periodic or reflection conditions, which are exact in the
Gowdy waves case. As a side theoretical result, a new symmetrizer is explicitly
given, which extends the parametric domain of symmetric hyperbolicity for the
Z4 formalism. The application of these results to first-order BSSN-like
formalisms is also considered.
