No Arabic abstract
In this contribution to the volume in memoriam of Michel Henon, we thought appropriate to look at his early scientific work devoted to the dynamics of large assemblies of interacting masses. He predicted in his PhD thesis that, in such a system, first a collapse of mass occurs at the center and that later binaries stars are formed there. Henceforth, the negative energy of binding of pairs becomes a source of positive energy for the rest of the cluster which evaporate because of that. We examine under what conditions such a singularity can occur, and what could happen afterwards. We hope to show that this fascinating problem of evolution of self-gravitating clusters keeps its interest after the many years passed since Henon thesis, and is still worth discussing now.
Several variants of the classic Fibonacci inflation tiling are considered in an illustrative fashion, in one and in two dimensions, with an eye on changes or robustness of diffraction and dynamical spectra. In one dimension, we consider extension mechanisms of deterministic and of stochastic nature, while we look at direct product variations in a planar extension. For the pure point part, we systematically employ a cocycle approach that is based on the underlying renormalisation structure. It allows explicit calculations, particularly in cases where one meets regular model sets with Rauzy fractals as windows.
Paper in honour of Michel Henon, based on a talk presented at Institut Henri Poincare, Paris, 5 Decembre 2013.
Grothendieck and Harder proved that every principal bundle over the projective line with split reductive structure group (and trivial over the generic point) can be reduced to a maximal torus. Furthermore, this reduction is unique modulo automorphisms and the Weyl group. In a series of six variations on this theme, we prove corresponding results for principal bundles over the following schemes and stacks: (1) a line modulo the group of nth roots of unity; (2) a football, that is, an orbifold of genus zero with two marked points; (3) a gerbe over a football whose structure group is the nth roots of unity; (4) a chain of lines meeting in nodes; (5) a line modulo an action of a split torus; and (6) a chain modulo an action of a split torus. We also prove that the automorphism groups of such bundles are smooth, affine, and connected.
The long timescale evolution of a self-gravitating system is generically driven by two-body encounters. In many cases, the motion of the particles is primarily governed by the mean field potential. When this potential is integrable, particles move on nearly fixed orbits, which can be described in terms of angle-action variables. The mean field potential drives fast orbital motions (angles) whose associated orbits (actions) are adiabatically conserved on short dynamical timescales. The long-term stochastic evolution of the actions is driven by the potential fluctuations around the mean field and in particular by resonant two-body encounters, for which the angular frequencies of two particles are in resonance. We show that the stochastic gravitational fluctuations acting on the particles can generically be described by a correlated Gaussian noise. Using this approach, the so-called $eta$-formalism, we derive a diffusion equation for the actions in the test particle limit. We show that in the appropriate limits, this diffusion equation is equivalent to the inhomogeneous Balescu-Lenard and Landau equations. This approach provides a new view of the resonant diffusion processes associated with long-term orbital distortions. Finally, by investigating the example of the Hamiltonian Mean Field Model, we show how the present method generically allows for alternative calculations of the long-term diffusion coefficients in inhomogeneous systems.
In this note, we unify and extend various concepts in the area of $G$-complete reducibility, where $G$ is a reductive algebraic group. By results of Serre and Bate--Martin--R{o}hrle, the usual notion of $G$-complete reducibility can be re-framed as a property of an action of a group on the spherical building of the identity component of $G$. We show that other variations of this notion, such as relative complete reducibility and $sigma$-complete reducibility, can also be viewed as special cases of this building-theoretic definition, and hence a number of results from these areas are special cases of more general properties.