IAS15: A fast, adaptive, high-order integrator for gravitational dynamics, accurate to machine precision over a billion orbits
Provides a fast, adaptive, high-precision integrator for long-term gravitational simulations, addressing the need for accurate orbit integration in astrophysics.
IAS15 is a 15th-order integrator for gravitational dynamics that achieves machine-precision accuracy over billions of orbits, outperforming symplectic and other high-order integrators in both speed and accuracy.
We present IAS15, a 15th-order integrator to simulate gravitational dynamics. The integrator is based on a Gauß-Radau quadrature and can handle conservative as well as non-conservative forces. We develop a step-size control that can automatically choose an optimal timestep. The algorithm can handle close encounters and high-eccentricity orbits. The systematic errors are kept well below machine precision and long-term orbit integrations over $10^9$ orbits show that IAS15 is optimal in the sense that it follows Brouwer's law, i.e. the energy error behaves like a random walk. Our tests show that IAS15 is superior to a mixed-variable symplectic integrator (MVS) and other popular integrators, including high-order ones, in both speed and accuracy. In fact, IAS15 preserves the symplecticity of Hamiltonian systems better than the commonly-used nominally symplectic integrators to which we compared it. We provide an open-source implementation of IAS15. The package comes with several easy-to-extend examples involving resonant planetary systems, Kozai-Lidov cycles, close encounters, radiation pressure, quadrupole moment, and generic damping functions that can, among other things, be used to simulate planet-disc interactions. Other non-conservative forces can be added easily.