Publication: Brownian Motion in Gravitationally Interacting Systems
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Date
2002
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American Physical Society
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Chatterjee, Pinaki, Lars Hernquist, and Abraham Loeb. 2002. “Brownian Motion in Gravitationally Interacting Systems.” Physical Review Letters 88 (12). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.88.121103.
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Abstract
wWe derive a model that describes the dynamics of a Brownian particle, such as a massive black hole, in a stellar system dominated by gravitational forces, and examine whether it achieves a state of equipartition of kinetic energy with the stars. This problem has been considered before only for stellar systems with an isothermal Maxwellian distribution of velocities; here we study other examples and confirm our calculations with N-body simulations. We show that in certain cases the black hole's steady state kinetic energy can be very far from equipartition.
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