Structure-preserving numerical simulations of test particle dynamics around slowly rotating neutron stars within Hartle-Thorne approach

TL;DR

This study investigates the chaotic dynamics of particles around slowly rotating neutron stars using structure-preserving numerical methods within the Hartle-Thorne spacetime, revealing complex phase space structures and the importance of numerical scheme choice.

Contribution

It introduces and compares structure-preserving numerical schemes for simulating geodesic motion in Hartle-Thorne spacetime, highlighting their effectiveness in capturing chaotic features without numerical drift.

Findings

Chaotic regions and Birkhoff islands identified in phase space.

Stickiness phenomenon influences orbit stability and divergence.

Projection methods improve long-term numerical accuracy.

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the chaotic signatures of the geodesic dynamics for particles moving in the slowly rotating Hartle-Thorne spacetime; an approximate solution of vacuum Einstein field equations describing the exterior of a massive, deformed, and slowly rotating compact object. We employ the numerical study to examine the geodesics of prolate and oblate deformations for generic orbits and find the plateaus of the rotation curve, which are associated with the existence of Birkhoff islands in the Poincare surface of the section, where the ratio of the radial and polar frequency of geodesics remains constant throughout the island. We investigate various phase space structures, including hyperbolic points and chaotic regions in the neighborhood of resonant islands. Moreover, chaotic behavior is observed to be governed by the stickiness phenomenon, where chaotic orbits remain attached to stable ones for an extended duration before eventually diverging and are attracted toward the surface of the neutron star. The precision of the numerical integration used to simulate the particle's trajectories plays a crucial role in the structures of the Poincare surface of the section. We present a comparison of several efficient structure-preserving numerical schemes of order four applied to the considered non-integrable dynamical system and we investigate which schemes possess the canonical property of the Hamiltonian flow. Among the class of non-symplectic integrators, we employ the explicit Runge-Kutta method and explicit general linear method with a standard projection technique to project the numerical solution onto the desired manifold. The projection scheme admits the integration without any drift from the desired manifold and is computationally cost-effective. We are concerned with two crucial aspects -- long-term behaviour and CPU time consumption.