English

A fundamental derivation of two Boris solvers and the Ge-Marsden theorem

Plasma Physics 2021-11-17 v2 Computational Physics

Abstract

For a separable Hamiltonian, there are two fundamental, time-symmetric, second-order velocity-Verlet (VV) and position-Verlet (PV) symplectic integrators. Similarly, there are two VV and PV version of exact energy conserving algorithms for solving magnetic field trajectories. For a constant magnetic field, both algorithms can be further modified so that their trajectories are exactly on the gyro-circle. The magnetic PV integrator then becomes the well known Boris solver, while VV yields a second, previously unknown, Boris-type algorithm. Remarkably, the required on-orbit modification is a reparametrization of the time step, reminiscent of the Ge-Marsden theorem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.04068,
  title  = {A fundamental derivation of two Boris solvers and the Ge-Marsden theorem},
  author = {Siu A. Chin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.04068},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

14 pages and 1 figures. Revised Title, Abstract, expanded Introduction and Conclusions