Deus Ex Statistica: The Disintegration of the Four Body Problem

The three and four body problems are some of the oldest physics problems, dating back to the age of Newton. They are famously chaotic, and thus no general analytic solution exists.

Both problems appear frequently in nature, mostly in clusters, and are the crux of any large-N simulations such as population synthesis or cluster dynamics.

In this talk I will present my work deriving an analytic outcome distributions for both of these problems, and I will investigate them using both analytical and numerical tools.

Such distributions allow one to skip the complicated dynamics of Newtonian gravitation, and directly get a valid outcome for the break-up process. A sampling recipe based on them could result in a substantial speed-up to large N-body simulations, paving the way for much larger and more intricate simulations.