Collisional Fragmentation Support in TRACE

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 70×. All updates described in this Note are available with the most recent public release of REBOUND.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Research Notes of the AAS

• Publication date

  2025-05-07

• Fields of study

  Physics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3847/2515-5172/add525arXiv 2505.04399
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• TRACE: a code for time-reversible astrophysical close encounters

  2024cited by this paper
• A new timestep criterion for N-body simulations

  2024cited by this paper
• Switching integrators reversibly in the astrophysical $N$-body problem

  2023cited by this paper
• Self-consistent Spin, Tidal, and Dynamical Equations of Motion in the REBOUNDx Framework

  2023cited by this paper
• Collisional fragmentation and bulk composition tracking in REBOUND

  2022cited by this paper
• Hybrid symplectic integrators for planetary dynamics

  2019cited by this paper
• WHFAST: a fast and unbiased implementation of a symplectic Wisdom-Holman integrator for long-term gravitational simulations

  2015cited by this paper
• ias15: a fast, adaptive, high-order integrator for gravitational dynamics, accurate to machine precision over a billion orbits

  2014cited by this paper
• REBOUND: An open-source multi-purpose N-body code for collisional dynamics

  2011cited by this paper
• A hybrid symplectic integrator that permits close encounters between massive bodies

  1999influential reference
• Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing

  1989cited by this paper
• Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach Geometric Numerical Integration

  year unknowncited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.