No Arabic abstract
We study the stability of a family of spherical equilibrium models of self-gravitating systems, the so-called $gamma-$models with Osipkov-Merritt velocity anisotropy, by means of $N-$body simulations. In particular, we analyze the effect of self-consistent $N-$body chaos on the onset of radial-orbit instability (ROI). We find that degree of chaoticity of the system associated to its largest Lyapunov exponent $Lambda_{rm max}$ has no appreciable relation with the stability of the model for fixed density profile and different values of radial velocity anisotropy. However, by studying the distribution of the Lyapunov exponents $lambda_{rm m}$ of the individual particles in the single-particle phase space, we find that more anisotropic systems have a larger fraction of orbits with larger $lambda_{rm m}$.
We revisit the r^{o}le of discreteness and chaos in the dynamics of self-gravitating systems by means of $N$-body simulations with active and frozen potentials, starting from spherically symmetric stationary states and considering the orbits of single particles in a frozen $N$-body potential as well as the orbits of the system in the full $6N$-dimensional phase space. We also consider the intermediate case where a test particle moves in the field generated by $N$ non-interacting particles, which in turn move in a static smooth potential. We investigate the dependence on $N$ and on the softening length of the largest Lyapunov exponent both of single particle orbits and of the full $N$-body system. For single orbits we also study the dependence on the angular momentum and on the energy. Our results confirm the expectation that orbital properties of single orbits in finite-$N$ systems approach those of orbits in smooth potentials in the continuum limit $N to infty$ and that the largest Lyapunov exponent of the full $N$-body system does decrease with $N$, for sufficiently large systems with finite softening length. However, single orbits in frozen models and active self-consistent models have different largest Lyapunov exponents and the $N$-dependence of the values in non-trivial, so that the use of frozen $N$-body potentials to gain information on large-$N$ systems or on the continuum limit may be misleading in certain cases.
We study chaos and Levy flights in the general gravitational three-body problem. We introduce new metrics to characterize the time evolution and final lifetime distributions, namely Scramble Density $mathcal{S}$ and the LF index $mathcal{L}$, that are derived from the Agekyan-Anosova maps and homology radius $R_{mathcal{H}}$. Based on these metrics, we develop detailed procedures to isolate the ergodic interactions and Levy flight interactions. This enables us to study the three-body lifetime distribution in more detail by decomposing it into the individual distributions from the different kinds of interactions. We observe that ergodic interactions follow an exponential decay distribution similar to that of radioactive decay. Meanwhile, Levy flight interactions follow a power-law distribution. Levy flights in fact dominate the tail of the general three-body lifetime distribution, providing conclusive evidence for the speculated connection between power-law tails and Levy flight interactions. We propose a new physically-motivated model for the lifetime distribution of three-body systems and discuss how it can be used to extract information about the underlying ergodic and Levy flight interactions. We discuss mass ejection probabilities in three-body systems in the ergodic limit and compare it to previous ergodic formalisms. We introduce a novel mechanism for a three-body relaxation process and discuss its relevance in general three-body systems.
We derive a semi-analytic criterion for the presence of chaos in compact, eccentric multiplanet systems. Beyond a minimum semimajor-axis separation, below which the dynamics are chaotic at all eccentricities, we show that (i) the onset of chaos is determined by the overlap of two-body mean motion resonances (MMRs), like it is in two-planet systems; (ii) secular evolution causes the MMR widths to expand and contract adiabatically, so that the chaotic boundary is established where MMRs overlap at their greatest width. For closely spaced two-planet systems, a near-symmetry strongly suppresses this secular modulation, explaining why the chaotic boundaries for two-planet systems are qualitatively different from cases with more than two planets. We use these results to derive an improved angular-momentum-deficit (AMD) stability criterion, i.e., the critical system AMD below which stability should be guaranteed. This introduces an additional factor to the expression from Laskar and Petit (2017) that is exponential in the interplanetary separations, which corrects the AMD threshold toward lower eccentricities by a factor of several for tightly packed configurations. We make routines for evaluating the chaotic boundary available to the community through the open-source SPOCK package.
We review the occurrence of the patterns of the onset of chaos in low-dimensional nonlinear dissipative systems in leading topics of condensed matter physics and complex systems of various disciplines. We consider the dynamics associated with the attractors at period-doubling accumulation points and at tangent bifurcations to describe features of glassy dynamics, critical fluctuations and localization transitions. We recall that trajectories pertaining to the routes to chaos form families of time series that are readily transformed into networks via the Horizontal Visibility algorithm, and this in turn facilitates establish connections between entropy and Renormalization Group properties. We discretize the replicator equation of game theory to observe the onset of chaos in familiar social dilemmas, and also to mimic the evolution of high-dimensional ecological models. We describe an analytical framework of nonlinear mappings that reproduce rank distributions of large classes of data (including Zipfs law). We extend the discussion to point out a common circumstance of drastic contraction of configuration space driven by the attractors of these mappings. We mention the relation of generalized entropy expressions with the dynamics along and at the period doubling, intermittency and quasi-periodic routes to chaos. Finally, we refer to additional natural phenomena in complex systems where these conditions may manifest.
Using direct $N$-body simulations of self-gravitating systems we study the dependence of dynamical chaos on the system size $N$. We find that the $N$-body chaos quantified in terms of the largest Lyapunov exponent $Lambda_{rm max}$ decreases with $N$. The values of its inverse (the so-called Lyapunov time $t_lambda$) are found to be smaller than the two-body collisional relaxation time but larger than the typical violent relaxation time, thus suggesting the existence of another collective time scale connected to many-body chaos.