Diffusion in barred-spiral galaxies

Maura Brunetti, Cristina Chiappini, Daniel Pfenniger

Published 2010-12-03Version 1

We characterize the radial migration of stars in the disk plane by calculating the diffusion coefficient and the diffusion time-scale for a bulge-disk N-body self-consistent system with a marginally-stable Toomre-Q parameter. We find that diffusion is not constant in time, but follows the evolution of the bar, and becomes maximum near the corotation region and in the external disk region, where asymmetric patterns develop.