Figure 14
The effect of cuts in final relative energy conservation. We plot the average error in the velocity of the escaping star (top row) and the error in the binary semimajor axis (bottom row) as a function of Hermite time-step parameter η (with same color coding as in Figure 10). The three columns differ in the maximum allowed level of relative energy conservation. In the left column we show the results for the total ensemble of solutions, in the middle column for a maximum level of unity and in the right column for 10−1. The bias in the left column for the binary semimajor axis is caused by solutions which grossly violate energy conservation. Note that this only happens for the cold collapse simulations. When these outliers are taken out of the ensemble, the bias vanishes.