Related papers: The discreteness-driven relaxation of collisionles…
We investigate the old problem of the fast relaxation of collisionless $N$-body systems which are collapsing or perturbed, emphasizing the importance of (non-collisional) discreteness effects. We integrate orbit ensembles in fixed external…
The collapse of a collisionless self-gravitating system, with the fast achievement of a quasi-stationary state, is driven by violent relaxation, with a typical particle interacting with the time-changing collective potential. It is…
The evolution of closed gravitational systems is studied by means of $N$-body simulations. This, as well as being interesting in its own right, provides insight into the dynamical and statistical mechanical properties of gravitational…
In an effort to better understand collisionless relaxation processes in gravitational systems, we investigate one-dimensional models. Taking advantage of a Hermite-Legendre expansion of relevant distribution functions, we present analytical…
The dynamical justifications which lie at the basis of an effective Statistical Mechanics for self gravitating systems are formulated, analyzing some among the well known obstacles thought to prevent a rigorous Statistical treatment. It is…
The formation of self-gravitating systems is studied by simulating the collapse of a set of N particles which are generated from several distribution functions. We first establish that the results of such simulations depend on N for small…
Simulations of purely self-gravitating N-body systems are often used in astrophysics and cosmology to study the collisionless limit of such systems. Their results for macroscopic quantities should then converge well for sufficiently large…
We revisit the r\^{o}le of discreteness and chaos in the dynamics of self-gravitating systems by means of $N$-body simulations with active and frozen potentials, starting from spherically symmetric stationary states and considering the…
In this paper, we present our conclusions from the numerical study of the collapse of a destabilized collisionless stellar system. We use both direct integration of the Vlasov-Poisson equations and an N-body tree code to obtain our results,…
The effects of discreteness arising from the use of the N-body method on the accuracy of simulations of cosmological structure formation are not currently well understood. After a discussion of how the relevant discretisation parameters…
We study, using both theory and molecular dynamics simulations, the relaxation dynamics of a microcanonical two dimensional self-gravitating system. After a sufficiently large time, a gravitational cluster of N particles relaxes to the…
We compare the conclusions reached using the coarse-graining technique employed by Henriksen (2004) for a one degree of freedom (per particle) collisionless system, to those presented in a paper by Binney (2004) based on an exact one degree…
The stability of the dynamical trajectories of softened spherical gravitational systems is examined, both in the case of the full $N$-body problem and that of trajectories moving in the gravitational field of non-interacting background…
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…
A theory recently proposed by the author aims to explain decoherence and the thermodynamical behaviour of closed systems within a conservative, unitary, framework for quantum gravity by assuming that the operators tied to the gravitational…
One of the fundamental aspects of statistical behaviour in many-body systems is exponential divergence of neighbouring orbits, which is often discussed in terms of Liapounov exponents. Here we study this topic for the classical…
Using the Ricci and scalar curvatures of the configuration manifold of gravitational N-body systems, we study the exponential instability in their trajectories. It is found that the exponentiation time-scale for isotropic Plummer spheres…
The physical origin of spacetime discreteness remains a central open problem in quantum gravity, with most existing approaches relying on specific microscopic structures or model-dependent assumptions. In this letter, spacetime discreteness…
Chaos is present in most stellar dynamical systems and manifests itself through the exponential growth of small perturbations. Exponential divergence drives time irreversibility and increases the entropy in the system. A numerical…
We investigate the dynamics of the ground state entanglement entropy for a discretized scalar field propagating within the Oppenheimer-Snyder collapse metric. Starting from a well-controlled initial configuration, we follow the system as it…