A new code for orbit analysis and Schwarzschild modelling of triaxial stellar systems

We review the methods used to study the orbital structure and chaotic properties of various galactic models and to construct self-consistent equilibrium solutions by Schwarzschild's orbit superposition technique. These methods are implemented in a new publicly available software tool, SMILE, which is intended to be a convenient and interactive instrument for studying a variety of 2D and 3D models, including arbitrary potentials represented by a basis-set expansion, a spherical-harmonic expansion with coefficients being smooth functions of radius (splines), or a set of fixed point masses. We also propose two new variants of Schwarzschild modelling, in which the density of each orbit is represented by the coefficients of the basis-set or spline spherical-harmonic expansion, and the orbit weights are assigned in such a way as to reproduce the coefficients of the underlying density model. We explore the accuracy of these general-purpose potential expansions and show that they may be efficiently used to approximate a wide range of analytic density models and serve as smooth representations of discrete particle sets (e.g. snapshots from an N-body simulation), for instance, for the purpose of orbit analysis of the snapshot. For the variants of Schwarzschild modelling, we use two test cases - a triaxial Dehnen model containing a central black hole, and a model re-created from an N-body snapshot obtained by a cold collapse. These tests demonstrate that all modelling approaches are capable of creating equilibrium models.Comment: MNRAS, 24 pages, 18 figures. Software is available at http://td.lpi.ru/~eugvas/smile

Dark matter annihilation near a black hole: plateau vs. weak cusp

Dark matter annihilation in so-called ``spikes'' near black holes is believed to be an important method of indirect dark matter detection. In the case of circular particle orbits, the density profile of dark matter has a plateau at small radii, the maximal density being limited by the annihilation cross-section. However, in the general case of arbitrary velocity anisotropy the situation is different. Particulary, for isotropic velocity distribution the density profile cannot be shallower than r^{-1/2} in the very centre. Indeed, a detailed study reveals that in many cases the term ``annihilation plateau'' is misleading, as the density actually continues to rise towards small radii and forms a weak cusp, rho ~ r^{-(beta+1/2)}, where beta is the anisotropy coefficient. The annihilation flux, however, does not change much in the latter case, if averaged over an area larger than the annihilation radius.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Matches published versio

Applying Schwarzschild's orbit superposition method to barred or non-barred disc galaxies

We present an implementation of the Schwarzschild orbit superposition method which can be used for constructing self-consistent equilibrium models of barred or non-barred disc galaxies, or of elliptical galaxies with figure rotation. This is a further development of the publicly available code SMILE; its main improvements include a new efficient representation of an arbitrary gravitational potential using two-dimensional spline interpolation of Fourier coefficients in the meridional plane, as well as the ability to deal with rotation of the density profile and with multicomponent mass models. We compare several published methods for constructing composite axisymmetric disc--bulge--halo models and demonstrate that our code produces the models that are closest to equilibrium. We also apply it to create models of triaxial elliptical galaxies with cuspy density profiles and figure rotation, and find that such models can be found and are stable over many dynamical times in a wide range of pattern speeds and angular momenta, covering both slow- and fast-rotator classes. We then attempt to create models of strongly barred disc galaxies, using an analytic three-component potential, and find that it is not possible to make a stable dynamically self-consistent model for this density profile. Finally, we take snapshots of two N-body simulations of barred disc galaxies embedded in nearly-spherical haloes, and construct equilibrium models using only information on the density profile of the snapshots. We demonstrate that such reconstructed models are in near-stationary state, in contrast with the original N-body simulations, one of which displayed significant secular evolution.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures; MNRAS, 450, 2842. The software is available at http://td.lpi.ru/~eugvas/smile