English

Ncorpi$\mathcal{O}$N : A $\mathcal{O}(N)$ software for N-body integration in collisional and fragmenting systems

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2024-03-27 v3 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Computational Physics Space Physics

Abstract

NcorpiO\mathcal{O}N is a NN-body software developed for the time-efficient integration of collisional and fragmenting systems of planetesimals or moonlets orbiting a central mass. It features a fragmentation model, based on crater scaling and ejecta models, able to realistically simulate a violent impact. The user of NcorpiO\mathcal{O}N can choose between four different built-in modules to compute self-gravity and detect collisions. One of these makes use of a mesh-based algorithm to treat mutual interactions in O(N)\mathcal{O}(N) time. Another module, much more efficient than the standard Barnes-Hut tree code, is a O(N)\mathcal{O}(N) tree-based algorithm called FalcON. It relies on fast multipole expansion for gravity computation and we adapted it to collision detection as well. Computation time is reduced by building the tree structure using a three-dimensional Hilbert curve. For the same precision in mutual gravity computation, NcorpiO\mathcal{O}N is found to be up to 25 times faster than the famous software REBOUND. NcorpiO\mathcal{O}N is written entirely in the C language and only needs a C compiler to run. A python add-on, that requires only basic python libraries, produces animations of the simulations from the output files. The name NcorpiO\mathcal{O}N, reminding of a scorpion, comes from the French NN-corps, meaning NN-body, and from the mathematical notation O(N)\mathcal{O}(N), due to the running time of the software being almost linear in the total number NN of moonlets. NcorpiO\mathcal{O}N is designed for the study of accreting or fragmenting disks of planetesimal or moonlets. It detects collisions and computes mutual gravity faster than REBOUND, and unlike other NN-body integrators, it can resolve a collision by fragmentation. The fast multipole expansions are implemented up to order six to allow for a high precision in mutual gravity computation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.20374,
  title  = {Ncorpi$\mathcal{O}$N : A $\mathcal{O}(N)$ software for N-body integration in collisional and fragmenting systems},
  author = {Jérémy Couturier and Alice C. Quillen and Miki Nakajima},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.20374},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages, 6 figures, 2 schemas