Thermodynamics of self-gravitating systems with softened potentials
Thermodynamics of self-gravitating systems with softened potentials
The microcanonical statistical mechanics of a set of self-gravitating particles is analyzed in a mean-field approach. In order to deal with an upper bounded entropy functional, a softened gravitational potential is used. The softening is achieved by truncating to N terms an expansion of the Newtonian potential in spherical Bessel …