2005/11/10 by Murat Kaplan, Kaplan, Murat, Hasan Saygin +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic confinement fusion research #Scientific Research and Discoveries #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0511304
14 pages, 3 figures, submitted for publication in New Astronomy
arxiv created 2005/11/10 · openalex publication_date 2005/11/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 symplecticity. In contrast, time symmetry can be easily maintained, at least for a continuous choice of time step size. In large-scale N-body simulations, however, one often uses block time steps, where all time steps are forced to take on values as powers of two. This greatly facilitates parallelization, and hence code efficiency. Straightforward implementation of time-symmetry, translated to block time steps, faces significant hurdles. For example, iteration can lead to oscillatory behavior, and even when such behavior is suppressed, energy errors show a linear drift in time. We present an approach that circumvents these problems.