Abstract
It is shown that the time of relaxation by particle encounters of self-gravitating systems in the plane interacting by 1/r 2 forces is of the same order of magnitude as the mean orbit time. There-fore such a system does not have a Vlasov limit for large numbers of particles, unless appeal is made to some non-zero thickness of the disk. The relevance of this results to numerical experiments on galactic structure is discussed.
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Rybicki, G.B. Relaxation times in strictly disk systems. Astrophys Space Sci 14, 15–19 (1971). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00649190
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00649190