Numerical irreversibility in self-gravitating small N-body systems

Nobuyoshi Komatsu, Takahiro Kiwata and Shigeo Kimura

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2008, vol. 387, issue 10, 2267-2278

Abstract: Numerical irreversibility due to round-off errors appearing in self-gravitating N-body systems is investigated by means of molecular dynamics methods. As a typical self-gravitating system, a closed spherical system consisting of N point-particles, which are interacting through the Plummer softened potential, is considered. In order to examine the numerical irreversibility, time-reversible simulations are executed: that is, a velocity inversion technique for a time-reversal operation is applied at a certain time during the evolution of the system. Through the simulations with various energy states, it is found that, under a restriction of constant initial potential energy, numerical irreversibility prevails more rapidly with decreasing initial kinetic energy. In other words, the lower the initial kinetic energy (or the lower the total energy), the earlier the memory of the initial conditions is lost. Moreover, an influence of integration step sizes (i.e., time increments Δt) on numerical irreversibility is examined. As a result, even a small time increment could not improve reversibility of the present self-gravitating system, although the small time increment reduces global errors in total energy.

Keywords: Self-gravitating system; Irreversibility; Round-off errors; N-body simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437107013337
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:387:y:2008:i:10:p:2267-2278

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2007.12.012

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().