Abstract
It is shown that the time of relaxation by particle encounters of self-gravitating systems in the plane interacting by 1/r 2 forces is of the same order of magnitude as the mean orbit time. Therefore such a system does not have a Vlasov limit for large numbers of particles, unless appeal is made to some non-zero thickness of the disk. The relevance of this result to numerical experiments on galactic structure is discussed.
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© 1972 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Rybicki, G.B. (1972). Relaxation Times in Strictly Disk Systems. In: Lecar, M. (eds) Gravitational N-Body Problem. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2870-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2870-7_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-2872-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-2870-7
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