Thermodynamic blocking in self-gravitating systems

2025/11/11 by Barnabás Deme, Jean-Baptiste Fouvry, Deme, Barnabás +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #Thermoelastic and Magnetoelastic Phenomena

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.08318

openalex publication_date 2025/11/11 · openalex created_date 2025/11/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Building upon a thermodynamic formalism, we show that self-gravitating systems in hydrostatic equilibrium with a uniform density are maximal entropy states when submitted to perturbations which are slow on dynamical timescale. We coin this phenomenon "thermodynamic blocking", given its similarity with the more general "kinetic blocking". This result underlines the importance of the thermodynamic formalism which proves useful when kinetic equations break down.

Citations

• Kinetic Theory of Stellar Systems: A Tutorial
• Kinetic blockings in long-range interacting inhomogeneous systems
• Kinetic theory of two-dimensional point vortices and fluctuation-dissipation theorem
• Scaling of the dynamics of a homogeneous one-dimensional anisotropic classical Heisenberg model with long-range interactions
• Vlasov-Poisson in 1D: waterbags
• Statistical mechanics of two-dimensional and geophysical flows
• A Balescu-Lenard type kinetic equation fot the collisional evolution of stable self-gravitating systems
• Statistical mechanics of violent relaxation in stellar systems
• Heap-based algorithm for one-dimensional particle systems

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• The maximum entropy principle of self-gravitating fluid system and field equations
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