Symmetry Breaking in d-Dimensional Self-gravitating Systems
  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 quasi-stationary states (QSS)
the life time 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.
