Bartuccelli-Deane-Gentile paper accepted in Celestial Mechanics

innerorbits1The paper “Fast numerics for the spin orbit equation with realistic tidal dissipation and constant eccentricity” co-authored by Michele Bartuccelli, Jonathan Deane, and Guido Gentile (Roma III and Visiting Professor at Surrey), has been accepted for publication in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. A link to the arXiv version is here. The paper presents an algorithm for the rapid numerical integration of a time-periodic ODE with a small dissipation term that is continuously differentiable in the velocity. Such an ODE arises as a model of spin-orbit coupling in a star/planet system, and the motivation for devising a fast algorithm for its solution comes from the desire to estimate probability of capture in various solutions, via Monte Carlo simulation: the integration times are very long, since they are interested in phenomena occurring on timescales of the order of 10 million years. The pay-off is an overall increase in speed by a factor of about 7.5 compared to standard numerical methods.