2010/04/19 by Tarcísio N. Teles, Yan Levin, Renato Pakter +2 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #Theoretical and Computational Physics #astro-ph.GA #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.gen-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2010/05/p05007
published as J.Stat.Mech.1005:P05007,2010
arxiv created 2010/04/19 · openalex publication_date 2010/05/14 · arxiv updated 2010/05/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We study, using both theory and molecular dynamics simulations, the relaxation dynamics of a microcanonical two-dimensional self-gravitating system. After a sufficiently large time, a gravitational cluster of N particles relaxes to the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. The time taken to reach the thermodynamic equilibrium, however, scales with the number of particles. In the thermodynamic limit, at fixed total mass, an equilibrium state is never reached and the system becomes trapped in a non-ergodic stationary state. An analytical theory is presented which allows us to quantitatively describe this final stationary state, without any adjustable parameters.