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Register a new userSymplectic integration for the collisional gravitational $N$-body problem
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We present a new symplectic integrator designed for collisional gravitational $N$-body problems which makes use of Kepler solvers. The integrator is also reversible and conserves 9 integrals of motion of the $N$-body problem to machine precision. The integrator is second order, but the order can easily be increased by the method of citeauthor{yos90}. We use fixed time step in all tests studied in this paper to ensure preservation of symplecticity. We study small $N$ collisional problems and perform comparisons with typically used integrators. In particular, we find comparable or better performance when compared to the 4th order Hermite method and much better performance than adaptive time step symplectic integrators introduced previously. We find better performance compared to SAKURA, a non-symplectic, non-time-reversible integrator based on a different two-body decomposition of the $N$-body problem. The integrator is a promising tool in collisional gravitational dynamics.
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We present a new parallel code for computing the dynamical evolution of collisional N-body systems with up to N~10^7 particles. Our code is based on the the Henon Monte Carlo method for solving the Fokker-Planck equation, and makes assumptions of spherical symmetry and dynamical equilibrium. The principal algorithmic developments involve optimizing data structures, and the introduction of a parallel random number generation scheme, as well as a parallel sorting algorithm, required to find nearest neighbors for interactions and to compute the gravitational potential. The new algorithms we introduce along with our choice of decomposition scheme minimize communication costs and ensure optimal distribution of data and workload among the processing units. The implementation uses the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library for communication, which makes it portable to many different supercomputing architectures. We validate the code by calculating the evolution of clusters with initial Plummer distribution functions up to core collapse with the number of stars, N, spanning three orders of magnitude, from 10^5 to 10^7. We find that our results are in good agreement with self-similar core-collapse solutions, and the core collapse times generally agree with expectations from the literature. Also, we observe good total energy conservation, within less than 0.04% throughout all simulations. We analyze the performance of the code, and demonstrate near-linear scaling of the runtime with the number of processors up to 64 processors for N=10^5, 128 for N=10^6 and 256 for N=10^7. The runtime reaches a saturation with the addition of more processors beyond these limits which is a characteristic of the parallel sorting algorithm. The resulting maximum speedups we achieve are approximately 60x, 100x, and 220x, respectively.
An accurate and efficient method dealing with the few-body dynamics is important for simulating collisional N-body systems like star clusters and to follow the formation and evolution of compact binaries. We describe such a method which combines the time-transformed explicit symplectic integrator (Preto & Tremaine 1999; Mikkola & Tanikawa 1999) and the slow-down method (Mikkola & Aarseth 1996). The former conserves the Hamiltonian and the angular momentum for a long-term evolution, while the latter significantly reduces the computational cost for a weakly perturbed binary. In this work, the Hamilton equations of this algorithm are analyzed in detail. We mathematically and numerically show that it can correctly reproduce the secular evolution like the orbit averaged method and also well conserve the angular momentum. For a weakly perturbed binary, the method is possible to provide a few order of magnitude faster performance than the classical algorithm. A publicly available code written in the c++ language, SDAR, is available on GitHub (https://github.com/lwang-astro/SDAR). It can be used either as a stand alone tool or a library to be plugged in other $N$-body codes. The high precision of the floating point to 62 digits is also supported.
The numerical simulations of massive collisional stellar systems, such as globular clusters (GCs), are very time-consuming. Until now, only a few realistic million-body simulations of GCs with a small fraction of binaries (5%) have been performed by using the NBODY6++GPU code. Such models took half a year computational time on a GPU based super-computer. In this work, we develop a new N-body code, PeTar, by combining the methods of Barnes-Hut tree, Hermite integrator and slow-down algorithmic regularization (SDAR). The code can accurately handle an arbitrary fraction of multiple systems (e.g. binaries, triples) while keeping a high performance by using the hybrid parallelization methods with MPI, OpenMP, SIMD instructions and GPU. A few benchmarks indicate that PeTar and NBODY6++GPU have a very good agreement on the long-term evolution of the global structure, binary orbits and escapers. On a highly configured GPU desktop computer, the performance of a million-body simulation with all stars in binaries by using PeTar is 11 times faster than that of NBODY6++GPU. Moreover, on the Cray XC50 supercomputer, PeTar well scales when number of cores increase. The ten million-body problem, which covers the region of ultra compact dwarfs and nuclearstar clusters, becomes possible to be solved.
Chaos is present in most stellar dynamical systems and manifests itself through the exponential growth of small perturbations. Exponential divergence drives time irreversibility and increases the entropy in the system. A numerical consequence is that integrations of the N-body problem unavoidably magnify truncation and rounding errors to macroscopic scales. Hitherto, a quantitative relation between chaos in stellar dynamical systems and the level of irreversibility remained undetermined. In this work we study chaotic three-body systems in free fall initially using the accurate and precise N-body code Brutus, which goes beyond standard double-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate that the fraction of irreversible solutions decreases as a power law with numerical accuracy. This can be derived from the distribution of amplification factors of small initial perturbations. Applying this result to systems consisting of three massive black holes with zero total angular momentum, we conclude that up to five percent of such triples would require an accuracy of smaller than the Planck length in order to produce a time-reversible solution, thus rendering them fundamentally unpredictable.
Gravitational softening length is one of the key parameters to properly set up a cosmological $N$-body simulation. In this paper, we perform a large suit of high-resolution $N$-body simulations to revise the optimal softening scheme proposed by Power et al. (P03). Our finding is that P03 optimal scheme works well but is over conservative. Using smaller softening lengths than that of P03 can achieve higher spatial resolution and numerically convergent results on both circular velocity and density profiles. However using an over small softening length overpredicts matter density at the inner most region of dark matter haloes. We empirically explore a better optimal softening scheme based on P03 form and find that a small modification works well. This work will be useful for setting up cosmological simulations.
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