On the accuracy of symplectic integrators for secularly evolving planetary systems

ABSTRACT Symplectic integrators have made it possible to study the long-term evolution of planetary systems with direct N-body simulations. In this paper we reassess the accuracy of such simulations by running a convergence test on 20 Myr integrations of the Solar System using various symplectic integrators. We find that the specific choice of metric for determining a simulation’s accuracy is important. Only looking at metrics related to integrals of motions such as the energy error can overestimate the accuracy of a method. As one specific example, we show that symplectic correctors do not improve the accuracy of secular frequencies compared to the standard Wisdom–Holman method without symplectic correctors, despite the fact that the energy error is three orders of magnitudes smaller. We present a framework to trace the origin of this apparent paradox to one term in the shadow Hamiltonian. Specifically, we find a term that leads to negligible contributions to the energy error but introduces non-oscillatory errors that result in artificial periastron precession. This term is the dominant error when determining secular frequencies of the system. We show that higher order symplectic methods such as the Wisdom–Holman method with a modified kernel or the SABAC family of integrators perform significantly better in secularly evolving systems because they remove this specific term.