Clustering in N-body gravitating systems

Maurizio Bottaccio, Luciano Pietronero, Alessandro Amici, Paolo Miocchi, Roberto Capuzzo Dolcetta and Marco Montuori

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2002, vol. 305, issue 1, 247-252

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.

Keywords: Classical statistical mechanics; Few- and many-body systems; Non-extensive thermodynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:305:y:2002:i:1:p:247-252

DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00670-7

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