A connected component-based method for efficiently integrating multiscale $N$-body systems

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.

12 pages, 8 figures, accepted for A&A

References in corpus (4)

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• 6th and 8th Order Hermite Integrator for N-body Simulations
• High Performance Direct Gravitational N-body Simulations on Graphics Processing Unit I: An implementation in Cg
• MYRIAD: A new N-body code for simulations of Star Clusters