Symmetry Breaking in d-Dimensional Self-gravitating Systems
Statistical Mechanics
2015-06-17 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies
Abstract
Systems with long-range interactions, such as self-gravitating clusters and magnetically confined plasmas, do not relax to the usual Boltzmann-Gibbs thermodynamic equilibrium, but become trapped in quasi-stationary states (QSS) the life time of which diverges with the number of particles. The QSS are characterized by the lack of ergodicity which can result in a symmetry broken QSS starting from a spherically symmetric particle distribution. We will present a theory which allows us to quantitatively predict the instability threshold for spontaneous symmetry breaking for a class of d-dimensional self-gravitating systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1311.4892,
title = {Symmetry Breaking in d-Dimensional Self-gravitating Systems},
author = {Renato Pakter and Bruno Marcos and Yan Levin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.4892},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters