Symmetry breaking in d-dimensional self-gravitating systems

Abstract

Systems with long-range interactions, such as self-gravitating clusters and magnetically confined plasmas, do not relax to the usual Boltzmann-Gibbs thermodynamic equilibrium, but become trapped in quasistationary states (QSS) the lifetime of which diverges with the number of particles. The QSS are characterized by the lack of ergodicity which can result in a symmetry broken QSS starting from a spherically symmetric particle distribution. We will present a theory which allows us to quantitatively predict the instability threshold for spontaneous symmetry breaking for a class of d-dimensional self-gravitating systems.