Collisionless Relaxation in Galactic Dynamics and the Evolution of Long Range Order

Abstract

This talk provides a critical assessment of collisionless galactic dynamics, focusing on the interpretation and limitations of the collisionless Boltzmann equation and the physical mechanisms associated with collisionless relaxation. Numerical and theoretical arguments are presented to motivate the idea that the evolution of a system far from equilibrium should be interpreted as involving nonlinear gravitational Landau damping, which implies a greater overall coherence and remembrance of initial conditions than is implicit in the conventional theory of violent relaxation.

20 pages, plain latex, no macros required, no figures a talk presented at the 1997 Florida Workshop on Nonlinear Astronomy and Physics, to appear in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Collisionless relaxation in gravitational systems: From violent relaxation to gravothermal collapse
• Chaos and the continuum limit in the gravitational N-body problem. I. Integrable potentials
• The discreteness-driven relaxation of collisionless gravitating systems: entropy evolution in external potentials, N-dependence and the role of chaos
• The Arrow of Time in the collapse of collisionless self-gravitating systems: non-validity of the Vlasov-Poisson equation during violent relaxation
• $N$-body chaos and the continuum limit in numerical simulations of self-gravitating systems, revisited
• Statistical mechanics of self-gravitating systems: mixing as a criterion for indistinguishability
• Symplectic coarse graining approach to the dynamics of spherical self-gravitating systems
• Chaos in violent relaxation dynamics. Disentangling micro- and macro-chaos in numerical experiments of dissipationless collapse