Session C3 - Astrophysics and Cosmology.
FOCUS session, Monday afternoon, June 25
Building 4, Room 153,
Using our recently developed dynamical Monte-Carlo code, we study the segregation or evaporation of a tracer stellar population with individual masses m_2 against a background population with individual masses m_1. We consider both light tracers (\mu \equiv m_2/m_1 < 1) and heavy tracers (\mu > 1), and use King and Plummer model initial conditions. In all our simulations we use 10^5 stars and ignore the effects of binaries and stellar evolution. For tidally truncated King models with very light tracers (\mu \leq 10^-2) we find, by core collapse, a depletion of tracers in the core and an enhancement in the halo. For some initial conditions the final tracer number density in the halo is greater than the initial tracer number density. We discuss the implications of these results for the evolution of planets and brown dwarfs in globular clusters. For heavy tracers, we find that the characteristic time to sink into the core goes like 1/\mu, as predicted by simple theoretical arguments. This work was supported by NSF and NASA.