Collisional Fragmentation Support in TRACE

TL;DR

This paper introduces enhanced collision support in TRACE, a hybrid integrator in REBOUND, enabling it to handle collisional fragmentation and particle management with significant speed improvements over existing integrators.

Contribution

The paper details the implementation of collisional fragmentation support in TRACE, allowing for robust particle handling and demonstrating substantial performance gains.

Findings

TRACE matches other integrators' behavior in collision handling

Speedups of over 70x compared to previous versions

Supports large-N protoplanetary disk simulations with various collision models

Abstract

We present improved collision support for TRACE, a state-of-the-art hybrid integrator in REBOUND. TRACE now supports collisional fragmentation and can handle both removing and adding particles mid-timestep. We describe the back-end logic implemented for robust collision support, and compare TRACE's performance to other integrators including MERCURIUS on a large-N protoplanetary disk simulation with various collision prescriptions, a system which TRACE previously could not handle. TRACE matches the behavior of these integrators, while offering potentially vast speedups of over 70x. All updates described in this Note are available with the most recent public release of REBOUND.