Paper detail

Secular dynamics of hierarchical multiple systems composed of nested binaries, with an arbitrary number of bodies and arbitrary hierarchical structure. III. Suborbital effects: hybrid integration techniques and orbit-averaging corrections

The SecularMultiple code, presented in two previous papers of this series, integrates the long-term dynamical evolution of multiple systems with any number of bodies and hierarchical structure, provided that the system is composed of nested binaries. In the formalism underlying SecularMultiple, we previously averaged over all orbits in the system. This approximation significantly speeds up numerical integration of the equations of motion, making large population synthesis studies possible. However, the orbit averaging approximation can break down when the secular evolution timescale of the system is comparable to or shorter than any of the orbital periods in the system. Here, we present an update to SecularMultiple in which we incorporate hybrid integration techniques, and orbit-averaging corrections. With this update, the user can specify which orbits should be integrated directly (without averaging), or assuming averaged orbits. For orbits that are integrated directly, we implemented two integration techniques, one which is based on the regularised Kustaanheimo-Stiefel equations of motion in element form. We also implemented analytical orbit-averaging corrections for pairwise interactions to quadrupole order. The updates presented here provide more flexibility for integrating the long-term dynamical evolution of hierarchical multiple systems. By effectively combining direct integration and orbit averaging the long-term evolution can be accurately computed, but with significantly lower computational cost compared to existing direct N-body codes. We give a number of examples in which the new features are beneficial. Our updated code, which is written in C++ supplemented with a user-friendly interface in Python, is freely available.