Tristan Bachmann Honors Thesis Presentation

10:30–11:00 am ERC 576

Tristan Bachmann "Effective Dissipation in Collisionless Gravitating Systems"
Supervisor: Prof. Robert Rosner

Landau damping is a classic problem in plasma physics, involving the attenuation of waves in a collisionless plasma through electromagnetic interactions. We investigate gravitational analogs to Landau damping in collisionless self-gravitating systems, using the Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) in collaboration with Dr. Salman Habib’s group at Argonne National Lab. With HACC, we model the N-body system of a self-gravitating slab of a single stellar population, reminiscent of a cross section of a galactic plane far from the bulge. We demonstrate the effective dissipation of small perturbations in the velocity distribution via gravitational Landau damping and show that despite the attenuation of the perturbation, its spectral decomposition remains the same, showing evidence of phase mixing.

Event Type

Seminars, Talks

May 27