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Updated: May 3, 2026

Setting Limits on Supersymmetry Using Simplified Models
Published on: November 15, 2013
Symmetry breaking in d-dimensional self-gravitating systems
Renato Pakter1, Bruno Marcos2, Yan Levin1
1Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Caixa Postal 15051, CEP 91501-970, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
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.
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