Symmetric Multistep Methods Revisited: II. Numerical Experiments

Abstract

AbstractBy using the stability condition and general formulas developed by Fukushima (1998 = Paper I) we discovered that, just as in the case of the explicit symmetric multistep methods (Quinlan and Tremaine, 1990), when integrating orbital motions of celestial bodies, the implicit symmetric multistep methods used in the predictor-corrector manner lead to integration errors in position which grow linearly with the integration time if the stepsizes adopted are sufficiently small and if the number of corrections is sufficiently large, say two or three. We confirmed also that the symmetric methods (explicit or implicit) would produce the stepsize-dependent instabilities/resonances, which was discovered by A. Toomre in 1991 and confirmed by G.D. Quinlan for some high order explicit methods. Although the implicit methods require twice or more computational time for the same stepsize than the explicit symmetric ones do, they seem to be preferable since they reduce these undesirable features significantly.