English

Collisional Fragmentation Support in TRACE

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-05-08 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We present improved collision support for TRACE, a state-of-the-art hybrid integrator in REBOUND. TRACE now supports collisional fragmentation and can handle both removing and adding particles mid-timestep. We describe the back-end logic implemented for robust collision support, and compare TRACE's performance to other integrators including MERCURIUS on a large-N protoplanetary disk simulation with various collision prescriptions, a system which TRACE previously could not handle. TRACE matches the behavior of these integrators, while offering potentially vast speedups of over 70x. All updates described in this Note are available with the most recent public release of REBOUND.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.04399,
  title  = {Collisional Fragmentation Support in TRACE},
  author = {Tiger Lu and Haniyeh Tajer and David M. Hernandez and Hanno Rein and Yurou Liu and Malena Rice},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.04399},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted in RNAAS

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:24:27.572Z