Gurzadyan's Problem 5 and improvement of softenings for cosmological simulations using the PP method

Abstract

This paper is devoted to different modifications of two standard softenings of the gravitational attraction (namely the Plummer and Hernquist softenings), which are commonly used in cosmological simulations based on the particle-particle (PP) method, and their comparison. It is demonstrated that some of the proposed alternatives lead to almost the same accuracy as in the case of the pure Newtonian interaction, even despite the fact that the force resolution is allowed to equal half the minimum interparticle distance. The revealed way of precision improvement gives an opportunity to succeed in solving Gurzadyan's Problem 5 and bring modern computer codes up to a higher standard.