Relaxation of spherical systems with long-range interactions: a numerical investigation

Abstract

The process of relaxation of a system of particles interacting with long-range forces is relevant to many areas of Physics. For obvious reasons, in Stellar Dynamics much attention has been paid to the case of 1/r^2 force law. However, recently the interest in alternative gravities emerged, and significant differences with respect to Newtonian gravity have been found in relaxation phenomena. Here we begin to explore this matter further, by using a numerical model of spherical shells interacting with an 1/r^alpha force law obeying the superposition principle. We find that the virialization and phase-mixing times depend on the exponent alpha, with small values of alpha corresponding to longer relaxation times, similarly to what happens when comparing for N-body simulations in classical gravity and in Modified Newtonian Dynamics.

6 pages, 3 figures, accepted in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos

References in corpus (5)

• Dissipationless collapses in MOND
• Forming Galaxies with MOND
• Dissipationless collapse, weak homology and central cores of elliptical galaxies
• Spherical Collapse in Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND)
• Phase mixing in MOND

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Relaxation of N-body systems with additive r^-α interparticle forces
• Dynamical origin of non-thermal states in galactic filaments
• Discreteness effects, $N-$body chaos and the onset of radial-orbit instability
• Symplectic coarse graining approach to the dynamics of spherical self-gravitating systems
• Radially anisotropic systems with $r^{-\alpha }$ forces. II: radial-orbit instability
• Radially anisotropic systems with $r^{-\alpha }$ forces: equilibrium states
• Dynamical friction in the quasi-linear formulation of modified Newtonian dynamics (QuMOND)
• Structure of the equivalent Newtonian systems in MOND N-body simulations. Density profiles and the core-cusp problem