A connected component-based method for efficiently integrating multi-scale N-body systems

Author： Jänes Jürgen Pelupessy Inti Portegies Zwart Simon

E-ISSN： 1432-0746|570|issue|A20-A20

ISSN： 0004-6361

Source： Astronomy & Astrophysics, Vol.570, Iss.issue, 2014-10, pp. : A20-A20

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

Previous Menu Next

Abstract

We present a novel method for efficient direct integration of gravitational N-body systems with a large variation in characteristic time scales. The method is based on a recursive and adaptive partitioning of the system based on the connected components of the graph generated by the particle distribution combined with an interaction-specific time step criterion. It uses an explicit and approximately time-symmetric time step criterion, and conserves linear and angular momentum to machine precision. In numerical tests on astrophysically relevant setups, the method compares favourably to both alternative Hamiltonian-splitting integrators as well as recently developed block time step-based GPU-accelerated Hermite codes. Our reference implementation is incorporated in the HUAYNO code, which is freely available as a part of the AMUSE framework.