Related papers: The effect of softening on dynamical simulations o…
Two questions that naturally arise in N-body simulations of stellar systems are: (1) How can we compare experiments that employ different types of softened gravity? (2) Given a particular type of softened gravity, which choices of the…
Modelling gravity is a fundamental problem that must be tackled in N-body simulations of stellar systems, and satisfactory solutions require a deep understanding of the dynamical effects of softening. In a previous paper (Romeo 1997), we…
Analysis of self-similarity in scale-free $N$-body simulations reveals the spatial and temporal scales for which statistics measured in cosmological simulations are converged to the physical continuum limit. We examine how the range of…
Cosmological simulations of structure formation follow the collisionless evolution of dark matter starting from a nearly homogeneous field at early times down to the highly clustered configuration at redshift zero. The density field is…
The determination of the resolution of cosmological N-body simulations, i.e., the range of scales in which quantities measured in them represent accurately the continuum limit, is an important open question. We address it here using…
Large volume cosmological simulations succeed in reproducing the large-scale structure of the Universe. However, they lack resolution and may not take into account all relevant physical processes to test if the detail properties of galaxies…
The softened point mass model is commonly used in simulations of gaseous discs including self-gravity while the value of associated length \lambda remains, to some degree, controversial. This ``parameter'' is however fully constrained when,…
The time evolution of initially balanced, rapidly rotating models for an isolated disk of highly flattened galaxies of stars is calculated. The method of direct integration of the Newtonian equations of motion of stars over a time span of…
Much of standard galaxy dynamics rests on the implicit assumption that the corresponding N-body problem is (near) integrable. This notion although leading to great simplification is by no means a fact. It is therefore important to develop…
Linear perturbation is used to investigate the effect of gravitational softening on the retrieved two-armed spiral eigenmodes of razor-thin stellar discs. We explore four softening kernels with different degrees of gravity bias, and…
We consider the use of N-body simulations for studying the evolution of rich star clusters (i.e. globular clusters). The dynamical processes included in this study are restricted to gravitational (point-mass) interactions, the steady tidal…
The main goal of this paper is to set up a numerical laboratory for the study of the slow evolution of the density and of the pressure tensor profiles of an otherwise collisionless stellar system, as a result of the interactions with a…
It is logically possible that early two-body relaxation in simulations of cosmological clustering influences the final structure of massive clusters. Convergence studies in which mass and spatial resolution are simultaneously increased,…
We present a comprehensive series of $N$-body as well as $N$-body + SPH simulations to study the secular evolution of the structure of disk galaxies. Our simulations are organized in a hierarchy of increasing complexity, ranging from…
The time evolution of models for an isolated disk of highly flattened galaxies of stars is investigated by direct integration of the Newtonian equations of motion of N=30,000 identical stars over a time span of many galactic rotations.…
A criterion for the choice of optimal softening length $\epsilon$ and time-step $dt$ for $N$-body simulations of a collisionless stellar system is analyzed. Plummer and Hernquist spheres are used as models to follow how changes in various…
We have developed a simple yet surprisingly accurate analytic scheme for tracking the dynamical evolution of substructure within larger dark halos. The scheme incorporates the effects of dynamical friction, tidal mass loss and tidal heating…
We present the results of a series of numerical simulations aimed to study the evolution of a disc galaxy within the global tidal field of a group environment. Both the disc galaxy and the group are modelled as multi-component,…
We address the issue of numerical convergence in cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations using a suite of runs drawn from the EAGLE project. Our simulations adopt subgrid models that produce realistic galaxy populations at…
We demonstrate that testing for self-similarity in scale-free simulations provides an excellent tool to quantify the resolution at small scales of cosmological N-body simulations. Analysing two-point correlation functions measured in…