Numerical integration of variational equations.

We present and compare different numerical schemes for the integration of the variational equations of autonomous Hamiltonian systems whose kinetic energy is quadratic in the generalized momenta and whose potential is a function of the generalized positions. We apply these techniques to Hamiltonian systems of various degrees of freedom and investigate their efficiency in accurately reproducing well-known properties of chaos indicators such as the Lyapunov characteristic exponents and the generalized alignment indices. We find that the best numerical performance is exhibited by the "tangent map method," a scheme based on symplectic integration techniques which proves to be optimal in speed and accuracy. According to this method, a symplectic integrator is used to approximate the solution of the Hamilton equations of motion by the repeated action of a symplectic map S , while the corresponding tangent map TS is used for the integration of the variational equations. A simple and systematic technique to construct TS is also presented.