Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Comparative Study Of Louville And Symplectic Integrators, Daniel I. Okunbor

Computer Science Technical Reports

In this paper, we construct an integrator that conserves volume in phase space. We compare the results obtained using this method and a symplectic integrator. The results of our experiments do not reveal any superiority of the symplectic over strictly volume-preserving integrators. We also investigate the effect of numerically conserving energy in a numerical process by rescaling velocities to keep energy constant at every step. Our results for Henon-Heiles problem show that keeping energy constant in this way destroys ergodicity and forces the solution onto a periodic orbit.