ICCUB LECTURE – LECTURES ON GRAVITATIONAL DYNAMICS [NOT TRANSLATED]

• Lecture 1: Astrophysical introduction to gravitational dynamics.

Basic concepts: mean-field regime, two-body relaxation, collective effects, secular evolution. Physical regimes: collisional vs. Collisionless. Overview of gravitational N-body problem, computational challenges. Astrophysical contexts: planetary systems, star clusters, galactic dynamics, cosmological structure formation.
 

• Lecture 2: Collisional systems planetary systems and star clusters.

Direct-summation methods. Symplectic and Hermite integration methods. Choice of timestep.
Two-body regularization schemes and their extensions. Secular evolution of near-Keplerian systems, orbit-averaged approach. Long-term evolution of planetary systems and globular clusters.
 

• Lecture 3: Collisionless systems galaxies and cosmology.

Force softening and its physical interpretation; resolution and convergence. Tree-code and fast multipole methods. Grid-based Poisson solvers (FFT and multigrid relaxation methods), adaptive mesh refine-ments schemes. Basis-set expansion technique. Cosmology: comoving coordinates, initial conditions, halo finders.

Hands-on session: Thursday 26th October, 10:00-12:00 (Room 505)

Overview of gravitational N-body simulation software.

Workflow ofnumerical simulations: creating initial conditions, running the simulation, analyzing andvisualizing the results. Individual simulation codes and integrated frameworks: NEMO, STARLAB, AMUSE. Architecture of the AMUSE framework. Creating and analyzing a simple N-body model.

Suggestions: install the AMUSE software on your laptop: http://amusecode.org/

Contact email: mromero(a)fqa.ub.edu [NOT TRANSLATED]