Very long-term relaxation of harmonic 1D self-gravitating systems

TL;DR

This study investigates the long-term relaxation dynamics of one-dimensional harmonic self-gravitating systems, revealing a quadratic growth in relaxation time with particle number for degenerate cases and linear scaling for non-degenerate systems, with implications for astrophysical density cores.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed numerical analysis of relaxation timescales in harmonic 1D self-gravitating systems, highlighting the transition from quadratic to linear scaling based on degeneracy.

Findings

Harmonic systems relax on a timescale quadratic in N.

Partially degenerate systems transition from quadratic to linear scaling at larger N.

Non-degenerate systems exhibit linear relaxation time scaling with N, with larger prefactors.

Abstract

One-dimensional self-gravitating systems admit genuine thermodynamical equilibria. For systems with strictly monotonic orbital frequency profile, the Landau and Balescu-Lenard theories predict a relaxation time scaling linearly with the number of particles, $N$, in agreement with simulations. Yet, these theories become ill-posed for degenerate frequency profiles, as is the case in the harmonic potential, where all particles share the exact same mean orbital frequency. Using an exact collision-driven 1D integrator, we investigate numerically the self-consistent relaxation of 1D harmonic self-gravitating systems. We show that harmonic systems relax on a timescale that grows quadratically with $N$. We show that systems that are only partially degenerate display the same quadratic scaling for low $N$, but transition to the linear, non-degenerate behaviour for larger $N$. The larger the fraction of degenerate orbits, the larger the value of $N$ at which this transition of dynamical regime occurs. Finally, we explore the dynamics of fully non-degenerate systems, albeit with finite radial support: we confirm that their relaxation time scales linearly with $N$, though with a substantially larger prefactor than in non-compact systems. Astrophysically, this investigation should offer some new clues on the dynamics of density cores, as in the center of dwarf galaxies.