Orbital alignment and mass segregation in galactic nuclei via vector
  resonant relaxation
  Supermassive black holes dominate the gravitational potential in galactic
nuclei. In these dense environments, stars follow nearly Keplerian orbits and
see their orbital planes relax through the potential fluctuations generated by
the stellar cluster itself. For typical astrophysical galactic nuclei, the most
likely outcome of this vector resonant relaxation (VRR) is that the orbital
planes of the most massive stars spontaneously self-align within a narrow disc.
We present a maximum entropy method to systematically determine this long-term
distribution of orientations and use it for a wide range of stellar orbital
parameters and initial conditions. The heaviest stellar objects are found to
live within a thin equatorial disk. The thickness of this disk depends on the
stars' initial mass function, and on the geometry of the initial cluster. This
work highlights a possible (indirect) novel method to constrain the
distribution of intermediate mass black holes in galactic nuclei.
