Explicit symplectic integrators with adaptive time steps in curved spacetimes

TL;DR

This paper introduces simple, efficient adaptive symplectic integrators for curved spacetimes, improving simulation accuracy and efficiency for particles and photons near black holes by adjusting existing methods with minimal computational overhead.

Contribution

It develops adaptive explicit symplectic integrators for curved spacetimes using a step-size control technique, enhancing previous nonadaptive methods with negligible additional cost.

Findings

Adaptive methods improve efficiency in black hole simulations

Implementation is simple with only two extra steps

Effective for chaotic dynamics outside black hole horizons

Abstract

Recently, our group developed explicit symplectic methods for curved spacetimes that are not split into several explicitly integrable parts, but are via appropriate time transformations. Such time-transformed explicit symplectic integrators should have employed adaptive time steps in principle, but they are often difficult in practical implementations. In fact, they work well if time transformation functions cause the time-transformed Hamiltonians to have the desired splits and approach 1 or constants for sufficiently large distances. However, they do not satisfy the requirement of step-size selections in this case. Based on the step-size control technique proposed by Preto $\&$ Saha, the nonadaptive time step time-transformed explicit symplectic methods are slightly adjusted as adaptive ones. The adaptive methods have only two additional steps and a negligible increase in computational cost as compared with the nonadaptive ones. Their implementation is simple. Several dynamical simulations of particles and photons near black holes have demonstrated that the adaptive methods typically improve the efficiency of the nonadaptive methods. Because of the desirable property, the new adaptive methods are applied to investigate the chaotic dynamics of particles and photons outside the horizon in a Schwarzschild-Melvin spacetime. The new methods are widely applicable to all curved spacetimes corresponding to Hamiltonians or time-transformed Hamiltonians with the expected splits. Also application to the backwards ray-tracing method for studying the motion of photons and shadows of black holes is possible.