FANTASY: User-Friendly Symplectic Geodesic Integrator for Arbitrary Metrics with Automatic Differentiation [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02237


We present FANTASY, a user-friendly, open-source symplectic geodesic integrator written in Python. FANTASY is designed to work “out-of-the-box” and does not require anything from the user aside from the metric and the initial conditions for the geodesics. FANTASY efficiently computes derivatives up to machine precision using automatic differentiation, allowing the integration of geodesics in arbitrary space(times) without the need for the user to manually input Christoffel symbols or any other metric derivatives. Further, FANTASY utilizes a Hamiltonian integration scheme that doubles the phase space, where two copies of the particle phase space are evolved together. This technique allows for an integration scheme that is both explicit and symplectic, even when the Hamiltonian is not separable. FANTASY comes prebuilt with second and fourth order schemes, and is easily extendible to higher order schemes. As an example application, we apply FANTASY to numerically study orbits in the Kerr-Sen metric.

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P. Christian and C. Chan
Wed, 7 Oct 20
76/76

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