Clustering in N-Body gravitating systems

Abstract

Self-gravitating systems have acquired growing interest in statistical mechanics, due to the peculiarities of the 1/r potential. Indeed, the usual approach of statistical mechanics cannot be applied to a system of many point particles interacting with the Newtonian potential, because of (i) the long range nature of the 1/r potential and of (ii) the divergence at the origin. We study numerically the evolutionary behavior of self-gravitating systems with periodical boundary conditions, starting from simple initial conditions. We do not consider in the simulations additional effects as the (cosmological) metric expansion and/or sophisticated initial conditions, since we are interested whether and how gravity by itself can produce clustered structures. We are able to identify well defined correlation properties during the evolution of the system, which seem to show a well defined thermodynamic limit, as opposed to the properties of the ``equilibrium state''. Gravity-induced clustering also shows interesting self-similar characteristics.

6 pages, 5 figures. To be published on Physica A

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Gravitational Dynamics of an Infinite Shuffled Lattice of Particles
• Exponents of non-linear clustering in scale-free one dimensional cosmological simulations
• Growth of correlations in gravitational N-body simulations
• Self-similarity and stable clustering in a family of scale-free cosmologies
• Testing growth rate dependence in cosmological perturbation theory using scale-free models
• Numerical and analytical studies on model gravitating systems