A fundamental derivation of two Boris solvers and the Ge-Marsden theorem

Abstract

For a separable Hamiltonian, there are two fundamental, time-symmetric, second-order velocity-Verlet (VV) and position-Verlet (PV) symplectic integrators. Similarly, there are two VV and PV version of exact energy conserving algorithms for solving magnetic field trajectories. For a constant magnetic field, both algorithms can be further modified so that their trajectories are exactly on the gyro-circle. The magnetic PV integrator then becomes the well known Boris solver, while VV yields a second, previously unknown, Boris-type algorithm. Remarkably, the required on-orbit modification is a reparametrization of the time step, reminiscent of the Ge-Marsden theorem.