Explicit adaptive symplectic (EASY) integrators: a scaling invariant generalisation of the Levi-Civita and KS regularisations (Q1766816)

The very well known LC (Levi-Cevita, 1920) regularization for the planar motion of two body problem or its extension to the spatial case KS ( Kustaanheimo-Stiefel, 1965) regularization is a standard technique for the numerical integration of eccentric orbits in the Kepler problem. It combines a time regularization with a canonical transformation. The time regularization removes singularities in the potential terms, but it has disadvantage of making the system or the Hamiltonian of the system more complicated. However, by using a proper canonical transformation the system become a regular Hamiltonian problem (a harmonic oscillator), making its numerical integration very efficient. On the other hand for the systems with singularities the use of the methods which inherit natural scalings (scale-invariant methods) can lead to sufficiently low integration errors. Here, the authors generalize the LC/KS regularization for two- and three-dimensional problems by adding to it a new scale-invariant regularization. The last one can be seen as complimentary to LC/KS as they work well for non-integrable problems, where the high eccentricity and/or singularities in the orbits make scaling effects important. There are 34 references.