Related papers: Towards time symmetric N-body integration
Time-symmetric integration schemes share with symplectic schemes the property that their energy errors show a much better behavior than is the case for generic integration schemes. Allowing adaptive time steps typically leads to a loss of…
The method of choice for integrating the equations of motion of the general N-body problem has been to use an individual time step scheme. For the sake of efficiency, block time steps have been the most popular, where all time step sizes…
The time step criterion plays a crucial role in direct N-body codes. If not chosen carefully, it will cause a secular drift in the energy error. Shared, adaptive time step criteria commonly adopt the minimum pairwise time step, which…
Calculating the long term solution of ordinary differential equations, such as those of the $N$-body problem, is central to understanding a wide range of dynamics in astrophysics, from galaxy formation to planetary chaos. Because generally…
Astrophysical research in recent decades has made significant progress thanks to the availability of various $N$-body simulation techniques. With the rapid development of high-performance computing technologies, modern simulations have been…
We present a simple algorithm to switch between $N$-body time integrators in a reversible way. We apply it to planetary systems undergoing arbitrarily close encounters and highly eccentric orbits, but the potential applications are broader.…
The time-symmetric block time--step (TSBTS) algorithm is a newly developed efficient scheme for $N$--body integrations. It is constructed on an era-based iteration. In this work, we re-designed the TSBTS integration scheme with dynamically…
Leapfrog integration has been the method of choice in N-body simulations owing to its low computational cost for a symplectic integrator with second order accuracy. We introduce a new leapfrog integrator that allows for variable timesteps…
Numerical solutions to Newton's equations of motion for chaotic self gravitating systems of more than 2 bodies are often regarded to be irreversible. This is due to the exponential growth of errors introduced by the integration scheme and…
We present new almost time-reversible integrators for solution of planetary systems consisting of "planets" and a dominant mass ("star"). The algorithms can be considered adaptive generalizations of the Wisdom--Holman method, in which all…
We review the implementation of individual particle time-stepping for N-body dynamics. We present a class of integrators derived from second order Hamiltonian splitting. In contrast to the usual implementation of individual time-stepping,…
This paper describes a fourth-order integration algorithm for the gravitational N-body problem based on discrete Lagrangian mechanics. When used with shared timesteps, the algorithm is momentum conserving and symplectic. We generalize the…
We present a new time-stepping criterion for N-body simulations that is based on the true dynamical time of a particle. This allows us to follow the orbits of particles correctly in all environments since it has better adaptivity than…
We derive a new criterion for estimating characteristic dynamical timescales in N-body simulations. The criterion uses the second, third, and fourth derivatives of particle positions: acceleration, jerk, and snap. It can be used for…
Most direct N-body integrations of planetary systems use a symplectic integrator with a fixed timestep. A large timestep is desirable in order to speed up the numerical simulations. However, simulations yield unphysical results if the…
Symplectic N-body integrators are widely used to study problems in celestial mechanics. The most popular algorithms are of 2nd and 4th order, requiring 2 and 6 substeps per timestep, respectively. The number of substeps increases rapidly…
It has previously been shown that varying the numerical timestep during a symplectic orbital integration leads to a random walk in energy and angular momentum, destroying the phase space-conserving property of symplectic integrators. Here…
We present a simple choice of integration variables that can be used to exploit the near-integrable character of problems in celestial mechanics. The approach is based on the well-known principle of variation of parameters: instead of…
This is the first in a series of papers devoted to fully general-relativistic $N$-body simulations applied to late-time cosmology. The purpose of this paper is to present the combination of a numerical relativity scheme, discretization…
We describe an algorithm for long-term planetary orbit integrations, including the dominant post-Newtonian effects, that employs individual timesteps for each planet. The algorithm is symplectic and exhibits short-term errors that are…