New families of symplectic splitting methods for numerical integration in dynamical astronomy

We present new splitting methods designed for the numerical integration of near-integrable Hamiltonian systems, and in particular for planetary N-body problems, when one is interested in very accurate results over a large time span. We derive in a systematic way an independent set of necessary and sufficient conditions to be satisfied by the coefficients of splitting methods to achieve a prescribed order of accuracy. Splitting methods satisfying such (generalized) order conditions are appropriate in particular for the numerical simulation of the Solar System described in Jacobi coordinates. We show that, when using Poincare Heliocentric coordinates, the same order of accuracy may be obtained by imposing an additional polynomial equation on the coefficients of the splitting method. We construct several splitting methods appropriate for each of the two sets of coordinates by solving the corresponding systems of polynomial equations and finding the optimal solutions. The experiments reported here indicate that the efficiency of our new schemes is clearly superior to previous integrators when high accuracy is required. (C) 2013 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.